


M. Sue Smith and the Dark Wizard

by agent_of_weirdness



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Awkward Romance, Book 5: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Character Study, Drama & Romance, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Grimmauld Place, Mystery, Original Character(s), POV Original Female Character, Slow Build, Slow Burn, mutant powers?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-09
Updated: 2017-03-31
Packaged: 2018-02-24 16:08:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 52,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2587613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agent_of_weirdness/pseuds/agent_of_weirdness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Miriam Susan Smith’s ordinary, unremarkable life came to an end on October eleventh of the year 2007, at 8:19 p.m., when she was struck by a car while walking home. What happens next could be the afterlife, a vivid dying hallucination, a schizophrenic break--or something else entirely. (It's also her fantasy made reality, so Sue's just going to go with it.)</p><p>It's time to save Severus Snape--or die trying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Chance Meeting of Smiths

**Author's Note:**

> FYI: This is very much a work in progress, subject to radical changes/edits once I finally get it completed. I'm uploading it to force me to keep writing without going back and getting bogged down with edits. I plan to update as steadily and often as possible. Rating is for language and for sexual content in future chapters, as well as mildly graphic depictions of violence and torture.

 

_So, so you think you can tell_

_Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain._

_Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?_

_A smile from a veil?_

_Do you think you can tell?_

-Pink Floyd,  _Wish You Were Here_ _  
_

Miriam Susan Smith’s ordinary, unremarkable life came to an end on October eleventh of the year 2007, at 8:19 p.m., when she was struck by a car while walking home.

She had spent that evening as she spent most of her evenings, at the Laving Public Library, where she worked. She was an assistant librarian, and she liked it well enough. It was not glamorous or exciting, but Miriam Susan Smith, who went by Miriam in Laving but still though of herself as Sue, was not a particularly glamorous or exciting person.

Sue felt the work suited her. She enjoyed being surrounded by books, even if, contrary to popular opinion, she had too much to do to allow reading during the work day. She enjoyed helping people find what they needed. She enjoyed the quiet. It was a simple job that allowed for plenty of time to let her mind wander and daydream, while her hands did their routine work by rote. She liked that most of all.

Sue had lived in Laving for nearly a year. Except for one or two day trips to see the Alamo and the like, she had spent the entire time within the county lines. In her imagination, she explored many worlds, but in her daily life, her routine was the rule and hardly ever varied.

She had a few acquaintances in the town, but no real friends, and no family. If Sue did not go in to work, she might not speak a word to a single soul. For the most part her thoughts dwelled between the pages of books; above all she tried never to think about her life before Laving. This had been her way of existing for some time, and she expected it would continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

That period of time, however, is generally a much shorter one than most people suppose.

On Thursdays the library closed at eight; at ten minutes to the hour, Sue conducted her customary closing routine, checking the restrooms and the stacks for any dawdlers, collecting stray books, shutting off computer monitors, so on and so forth. The Laving library was a small one, but even so, usually Sue had to usher out at least one or two people at closing time. On this evening, however, the library was deserted. Even the other full time librarian who usually closed the library with Sue on Thursday evenings was gone; she’d left earlier complaining of a stomachache.

Alone, Sue switched off the lights, put on her coat, and carefully tied her scarf over her frizzy, pale curls. At the entrance she paused to admire the stillness of the dark, empty building. The lack of sound other than that of her own body’s tick of life was so total, she fancied it had an aura all its own, humming just barely beyond the level of human perception. She could hear nothing, not the radiator nor the wind rattling in the eaves, not even a passing car or a night bird’s call from outside.

The other full-time librarian often complained that the silence of the empty library at night gave her the creeps, but Sue obtained an odd thrill from the sensation. In that moment, she was perfectly content with her current existence, of which she had approximately seventeen minutes left to enjoy.

Sue set the alarm, locked the doors and left the building at 8:01 p.m. At that same moment, the driver of the car that would end her life, Lori Smith (no relation), was scolding her Chihuahua puppy, Tito, who was once again chewing on the upholstery in the backseat of her car. Distracted by the damage to her pleather seat cushions, Lori ran a stop sign. Fortunately for Lori and Tito, no one was coming. Unfortunately for Sue, now walking down the flagstone steps and thinking vaguely of dinner, Lori and Tito continued on their way without incident.

Night had fallen; the sky was cloudy, the air cool and smelling of rain. Sue looked up at the sky, hoping for a glimpse of stars, but the clouds were thick and total overhead, like a dark wet blanket. A chilly, damp breeze stirred the ends of her scarf and made the hem of her coat flap against her knees. Sue sighed. She could practically feel her hair frizzing, even with the scarf covering it.

Sue walked slowly out of the parking lot and down the sidewalk, her hands in her coat pockets and her head down, watching her feet. She fingered the mp3 player in her pocket, but decided against it. Instead, as she approached the corner where she would turn onto Brewer Street, she picked up the thread of her current favorite daydream. Brewer Street had no sidewalk, so Sue stepped over the curb and into the street heading downhill, lost in her imagination. It was now 8:16 p.m. She had approximately three minutes left.

Sue reached the bottom of the hill and paused automatically at the intersection to look for traffic. Behind her, Lori’s car crested the hill. Tito, whether by fate or merely poor timing, chose this moment to sink his teeth into the back seat once again and tug enthusiastically. Lori’s head whipped around at the sound of squeaky Chihuahua growls and tearing fabric.

“No, Tito! Bad Tito! I SAID NO, BAD TITO!” Lori shrieked shrilly. Tito paid no notice.

Lori glanced back at the road just as Sue turned to face the approaching headlights, eyes wide. Lori’s car had drifted with her attention until it was all the way over on the left side of the road, with Sue directly in its path. Lori shrieked again and stomped the break, managing to avoid a head-on crash, but it had been raining. The car skidded on the slick road, back wheels continuing forward while front wheels locked, spinning the car broadside.

Sue did not even have time to scream before Lori’s car was upon her. The collision resembled a pinball stroke, with the pivoting car playing flipper and Sue starring as the hapless pinball. As the right passenger side suddenly filled her field of vision, she suddenly, inanely thought, _I will never finish re-reading_ _Harry Potter_ , and felt a sharp stab of sincere regret.

Then she and the rear car door connected, and the pain blotted out all other concerns. Her arms, thrown out in an automatic, useless warding-off gesture, made contact first; her right wrist snapped, her left elbow dislocated with a dull pop. Less than a beat later her left hip socked into the door handle recess with a hot flare of agony, wrenching a high, inhuman shriek from her throat. Almost in the same instant her skull kissed briefly and violently with the window, leaving behind a white star of cracked safety glass like a lipstick mark.

Adrenaline flooded her brain, kicking it into a higher gear, where thoughts came in flashes of understanding beyond the speed of words or language. _I’m going to die,_ Sue realized. _Not eventually, but right now, this fucking minute, I’m about to die._

As Sue’s feet left the ground and her body went flying backward through the air, a face flared to brilliant life in her mind’s eye. It was a face she had never seen, yet she knew it immediately, recognized it with a burst of surprised delight from a thousand hazy fantasies and imagined exchanges.

She saw every detail in astonishing clarity, from the dark eyebrows and darker eyes to the large, aquiline nose, thin lips fixed in a scowl, and strong, blunt chin. Sue saw even details she had never pictured clearly before: his eyes, for example, were not quite black after all, but so dark and deep a brown that his pupil could hardly be distinguished from his iris. His eyelashes were thick and short, a black fringe along the line of each eyelid, made more striking by the pallor of his skin. The oily black, pin-straight hair, just long enough to brush his shoulders in the back and a bit shorter around his face and sharp jawline, was parted slightly to the right, not dead center as she had always imagined. Although it looked as though it could do with a wash, it was neatly combed.

It occurred to Sue dimly that she was only having a vivid hallucination, brought on by a possibly fatal head injury. But that hardly seemed important, enthralled as she was by the vision. It was so real! Every line and pore of the man’s face, each individual hair and crease of flesh, stood out in vivid detail. There was a glow all around him, framing his features like some sort of ill-tempered, gloomy angel; despite the fact that she was very aware of her own imminent grisly death, Sue nearly laughed aloud at the idea. As if in response, the man’s dark scowl deepened further.

Sue realized that her eyes were closed. The passage of time stretched like warm taffy as Sue fell, each moment expanding into a small eternity; or perhaps it was her consciousness that had expanded, surpassing linear thought to perceive several layers of reality at once. Shouldn’t she have hit the ground by now? Was it ironic that she was spending her last few seconds mooning over a lovesick vision of a deceased fictional character, or just horribly pathetic?

Sue decided that it did not matter in the slightest. She was filled all at once with a sweet and aching sadness, a deep regret that this was the closest she had ever, would ever come to fulfilling her secret, shameful longing. She was flooded with an overpowering, warm rush of affection for her vision, no less real for all its object’s fictionality.

Though the man’s features seemed to Sue the most perfect in this universe and possibly in several neighboring ones, she could plainly see that they were worn and tired. There were heavy bags under his eyes and his skin was sallow and wan over his hollowed cheeks, as if he hadn’t been eating or sleeping properly for some time. Sue’s heart swelled painfully in her throat, throbbing with a mute passion too huge to give sound. Her whole being stretched out in yearning in response to the weary bitterness she glimpsed in the pinched set of his pale, lined face.

What she would give to be able to do something to help him, even the tiniest bit! _What_ wouldn’t _I give,_ she thought, _for just the chance, one fucking chance, to try?_ She had only ever wanted one other thing as much as she wanted _this_ , and that too had been an impossible wish.

For every force there is an equal opposing force. The velocity of Sue’s flight after being struck by the car should have landed her in the street nearly twenty feet away from the intersection where she had stood. But Sue did not land there at all. Instead, Sue felt something _shift_ deep inside her, like an unused muscle suddenly clenching, straining with the effort to contract.

That well-loved face vanished like a star winking out in the dawn; Sue had a brief glimpse of a long line of doors, all shapes and sizes and colors, all flying wide open at once. The many doorways grew and stretched like dark mouths opening up, bleeding together to swallow her; she flew headlong towards the black, but before she reached it, Sue passed out.

________________________________________________________________

Lori Smith’s car finally skidded to a stop, facing almost 180 degrees opposite its original course. Lori opened her door and climbed out, shaking. Slowly, reluctantly, she turned to look at the carnage she knew was behind her.

But nothing was there.

Lori stared, then rubbed her eyes and stared some more. She stood there for a moment, stunned, then turned abruptly and dove back into her car, scrabbling for the flashlight in her glove compartment. She fumbled and almost dropped it, but finally managed to turn it on and train it on the road behind her car.

Lori searched up and down Brewer Street and Poppy Lane in both directions of the intersection, then in the ditches, and then finally in the yards of the houses on either side. Minutes passed and became hours. Lori found the woman’s scarf, lying in the middle of the street, and one shoe in the ditch which might or might not have been the woman’s, but the woman herself was nowhere to be found. Lori finally went back to her car and checked it all over, thinking perhaps she had somehow imagined the whole thing.

But no. The flashlight beam revealed a cracked window and a definite dent in the right rear side of her car, much bigger than any of the car’s many other dings and scrapes. She had clearly struck something large.

And she _remembered_ hitting the woman. She had _seen_ her caught in the headlight beams like the proverbial deer. The ghastly thunk of her body bouncing off the side of the vehicle had struck Lori’s ears as hard a physical blow. She could not possibly have imagined that. Could she?

Lori ran her thumb over the new spider-webbed star marring the rear passenger window glass, lost in thought. When she closed her eyes she saw the woman’s head striking the window and bouncing off, again and again, bushy hair flying free of her scarf and obscuring her face.

Yet the woman was gone.

In the back seat, Tito chewed happily on the frayed seat cushions.

 


	2. The Right Place, at the Right Time

 

 _Rejoice despite the fact this world will hurt you_  
 _Rejoice despite the fact this world will kill you_  
 _Rejoice despite the fact this world will tear you to shreds_  
 _Rejoice because you’re trying your best_.

\- Andrew Jackson Jihad,  _Rejoice_

 

The first thing Sue was aware of was that she was cold, noting distantly that she was lying down, face up, on something thick and soft and a bit springy. Breathing in, Sue smelled grass, but not the dry straw smell of October grass; this smell was fresh and green, a summer smell. The night air she felt on her exposed face was wrong for the season too: cool and slightly humid, but still too warm and with none of the bite of autumn.

Though she took in these details, Sue could make no sense of them. The only thing Sue could focus on was the pain. It was as though everything from her hips down had been dipped in fire. In comparison, the pain in her head was almost bearable. Sue held herself as still as possible, breathing in shallow, quick pants. But she was so chilly, even in her coat; she began to shiver, and moaned weakly when the movement intensified the pain.

Sue drifted away again. Everything was black. Then Sue suddenly realized her eyes were closed, and opened them. All she could see was the black night sky, perfectly clear and littered with stars; before her dizzy eyes the constellations shimmered, vacillating and expanding as if they breathed. The moon hung fat in the sky, pulsing in her warped vision like a beating heart. It was beautiful, but it was also wrong somehow. Before she could identify what, exactly, was wrong about it, she passed out once more.

 

________________________________________________________________

 

There was a rustling sound in the grass behind him, too heavy and loud to be merely harmless wildlife or the wind. Severus jerked around, wand already in hand. He had always kept it on his person within ready reach, but lately it was more often than not hidden just up his sleeve, needing only a flick of his wrist to drop into his waiting palm. He dropped to one knee before he had even finished turning, half expecting a curse to go flying over his head.

But there was no curse to dodge, no wizard creeping up from behind to hex him. He stood upright again in one smooth, swift motion, but he did not stow away his wand. Severus was quite paranoid even at the best of times, and while these were decidedly not those, there was nothing wrong with his hearing, at least. Something was there.

Slowly, Severus approached the edge of the castle lawn where it met the sandy soil of the lakeshore. The grass was longer than usual. Hagrid allowed it to grow during the summer months, but no more than calf-high, and though calf-high for Hagrid might be up to a normal-sized man’s hips, it was nowhere near that tall yet.

Still, it was plenty overgrown enough to hide all manner of dangers. Severus scanned the meadow stretching out before him by the light of the moon, keeping his stance low and his wand unlit in case there really was a caster hiding among the rustling blades, waiting to take aim. It was unlikely, especially here on the school grounds, but it would not be the first time an enemy found his way into Hogwarts.

There was another rustle, fainter this time, and then he heard it, his skin lumping up into gooseflesh under his robes despite the warmth of the night: a low moan of pain. Memories rose up unbidden at the sound, recent ones from the past two weeks bleeding into old ones from his ill-spent youth, but Severus pushed them viciously aside, suppressing the emotion ruthlessly almost before he could sense it. Wordlessly he lit his wand, casting a bluish light only slightly brighter than that cast by the full moon high in the night sky overhead.

There. He trained the beam of his wandlight on a dark form lying half-hidden in the grass a few meters away. It was a woman, dressed all in Muggle clothing, he noted with surprise. Even in the poor light, it was clear she was gravely injured. The grass around her head glistened black with blood flowing from an ugly wound on the left side of her head, matting the woman’s pale hair on that side into a dark, bloody mess.

For a moment he was certain she was dead, and the cold prickle that slipped down his spine at the thought surprised Severus nearly as much as it irritated him. Then her face twisted, a weak cry escaping her lips; her eyelids flickered but stayed shut as Severus quickly knelt, trying to identify her wounds so he could begin healing them before the woman actually did die in front of him.

The woman—girl, really, he thought when he directed the wandlight towards her head and got a closer look at the unbloodied side of her face—was quiet and still again, eyes still closed; probably unconscious and insensate, Snape thought, and spared a moment to silently cast another spell; it revealed no people hidden nearby, wizard or Muggle, so he turned his wand to the woman, casting first a pain-numbing spell and then a general healing spell. It would hopefully keep her alive until a real healer could tend to her. Severus was reluctant to risk doing more—with his limited skill at healing spells, he might do more harm then help.

He touched her wrist; her pulse was thready, but still strong enough to feel under his fingertips. Her skin was cold as ice, even to his own none-too-warm hands; after a brief hesitation, he cast a warming charm over her coat and rose hastily back onto his feet. He was relieved that her wounds did not seem to be inflicted by an animal, especially with the full moon shining overhead. The wards should not allow werewolves onto the grounds, but then again they should not have allowed a stranger to pass the gates without an escort, either.

With a flick of his wand, he conjured a stretcher and levitated the girl onto it with great care, trying to keep her as still as possible. It would be wiser not to move her at all, he knew, in case she was bleeding internally or had a spinal injury, but he could not leave her alone out here, where whomever had done this to her might return to finish the job. Nor was there time to summon help and wait; there was no telling how long she had already lain out here bleeding. She was already going into shock, little tremors making her shoulders shake, drawing another weak moan from her.

As he settled her slowly onto the floating stretcher, Severus’s eyes raked the grass, searching for a wand. She was dressed more sensibly than most witches trying to pass as Muggle, yet the coat she wore was far too warm for a summer night, even in Scotland. He saw none. Nor did he spot the girl’s missing shoe anywhere nearby with his cursory glance, though if it matched her other one the red should have stuck out like a sore thumb in the dark grass. Perhaps she had lost it while running, trying to escape her attacker?

If indeed there was an attacker; there was no sign of another person that he could detect, either.

The woman might or might not be an innocent victim, but her presence nonetheless meant that the defenses of Hogwarts had somehow been penetrated. “ _Expecto Patronum_ ,” he muttered quietly, summoning his Patronus without breaking stride and sending it on to find the Headmaster with a message to meet Severus in the infirmary.

Severus strode swiftly over the lawns back to the castle, directing the stretcher to float alongside him and blinking away the silver-bright afterimage floating in his vision. The path was so familiar he hardly needed to see it; indeed, he hardly did see it, lost in thought as he was.

It was fortunate that Pomfrey hadn’t yet departed for her vacation as the majority of the staff had done. After the incident with the Diggory boy, Severus was not surprised that his colleagues would want to take themselves far away from Hogwarts for a while; there was a definite gloom over the castle, even Severus felt it.

For himself, however, it mattered little where he was; he carried his own shadows with him and there was no respite from them anywhere. It was still less depressing in the castle than in Cokeworth at Spinner’s End, at least. So he stayed. The Dark Lord expected him to stick close to the Headmaster, and at Hogwarts Severus could meet and plot with Dumbledore as often as they liked with no one the wiser.

Severus knew Dumbledore well enough to suspect that he would not want this trespassing young woman to leave the grounds until he knew exactly how the girl had come to be there. The wards were the Headmaster’s domain, and Dumbledore knew more about warding magic than any other wizard living. Severus would leave that question to the Headmaster, just as he was leaving the healing to the nurse.

Severus would concern himself with finding out _why_ the girl was here. And if he discovered her presence somehow posed a threat to him or to the school, he would concern himself with ending that threat. Swiftly, and permanently.

________________________________________________________________

 

When Sue woke again, her head was much clearer. The pain was still there, but so distant it hardly felt like it belonged to her at all. Though she could think again, Sue could not seem to lift her eyelids to look around. All was quiet except for the sound of cloth fluttering slightly; window curtains in a breeze?

Sue sensed empty space all around and above her, as if she was in a large and high-ceilinged room; she detected a dim glow through her closed eyelids, warm and yellow like the light from a candle or a storm lantern. She wondered where she was, and how she got there, but without much urgency or concern; wherever she was, Sue felt certain she was safe here.

Sue thought perhaps she had been drugged, for the pain. Why was she in pain? Sue could not recall what had happened for a moment; then she remembered the car, looming large in her vision as it skidded towards her. So she had been hit, but she hadn’t died, after all.

Was she in a hospital then? But Sue remembered the smell of hospital well, that strong, nose-burning odor of rubbing alcohol, antibacterial soap, and hand sanitizer, with a sickly-sweet tang of sweat, urine, and other various bodily fluids all mixed together, lurking underneath the antiseptic smells. All Sue smelled here was clean cotton, probably from the sheets of the bed she was tucked into.

“Has our guest awoken yet, Madam Pomfrey?” a voice asked, deep and male but slightly wavering—the voice of an old man. Sue started at the unexpected sound, causing a dull twinge of pain in her hips and legs.

“She has now,” said a woman’s voice in a dry, brisk manner. Sue heard a bustling noise approach and forced her heavy eyelids apart with an effort. The matronly woman now standing over Sue’s bed met Sue’s newly opened eyes with a brief, close-lipped smile. She was dressed in a very old-fashioned nursing uniform, and although Sue did not know her, somehow she seemed very familiar. The closest Sue could come to describing the sensation—it was like seeing the parent of an old schoolmate in some public place and recognizing their features without being able to remember the context.

Oddly, the nurse abruptly held up a wooden stick in one hand—a mostly-straight twig about as thick as Sue’s index finger and as long as her forearm, polished smooth. When she swept it sharply down, like a conductor’s baton, a volley of colorfully glowing ropes of light streamed out from the tip and knotted themselves into an incomprehensible pattern over Sue’s prone body.

“Jesus!” Sue cried, attempting to sit upright, only to collapse limply before she could even lift her back a few inches off the mattress. Her head throbbed dully, with the occasional sharp stabbing pain, like a knitting needle being pushed through her temple. “What _is_ that?”

“You had several broken bones, some minor lacerations and sprains, and a dislocated hip _and_ elbow, young lady,” the woman addressed Sue without looking at her, lips pressed tightly together as if she strongly disapproved of anyone managing to get so many injuries at once. She ignored Sue’s question, keeping her eyes fixed on the colored strings of light swirling slowly over Sue, now concentrated mostly over her still-tender head.

“A concussion too, it seems.” The woman clucked her tongue, shaking her head. “I’ve healed everything else with no trouble, but blows to the head are nothing to take lightly. You’ll need to take this potion and stay here over-night at the least for monitoring.”

As she spoke, the matronly woman waved her stick again, and a bottle bobbed into view, floating without any means of visible support. Too bewildered to protest, Sue stared openly as the nurse plucked the bottle out of the air and pulled the old-fashioned cork stopper, which came loose with an audible pop.

The woman pointed the stick—wand? Surely not—at Sue’s head, making her flinch automatically, but the nurse’s target was only Sue’s pillow; it grew and changed shape beneath her, raising her head and shoulders. Sue obediently drank, though the nurse had to hold the bottle up to her lips because Sue’s arms were too weak and rubbery. It tasted odd, bitter like grass or dandelion greens and with a hint of licorice and something that reminded Sue of mothballs.

“Where am I? What happened?” Sue rasped when she had drained the bottle, resisting the urge to try to rub the taste of the (Medicine? _Potion?_ Christ.) off of her tongue. The nurse’s stern expression flickered, and she glanced toward the other side of Sue’s bed, as if looking for help.

Sue turned her head, ignoring the creaking protest of her neck muscles. All the air left her lungs in a flat whoosh, leaving her mouth hanging open, literally slack-jawed in astonishment.

The man standing there, the one who had startled Sue by speaking, seemed to have stepped right out of a story. It was hard to say which screamed “wise and ancient wizard” more—the flowing blue robes flecked with tiny, shimmering golden stars that the man wore, or his long, crooked nose topped with a pair of half-moon spectacles. Actually, it was most likely the man’s long, white hair and equally long, white beard, hanging down almost past his knees.

But far more astonishing than the man’s appearance, Sue was sure that she _recognized_ him, though she was equally sure they had never met. Her mind offered up “costume” as an explanation, but Sue had to dismiss it. Somebody could dress like her idea of Albus Dumbledore easily enough, but how could he possibly have the same face, the _exact_ same features, that she had always pictured?

The man’s beard twitched slightly around his mouth, as if he were restraining the urge to smile. His bright blue eyes twinkled merrily as he watched her over his spectacles and down his long nose. Sue belatedly realized her mouth was still hanging open; she shut it with a snap, feeling her cheeks grow warm. _Holy shit,_ Sue thought, bemused. _I thought it was bullshit, but it’s totally true. They really do_ twinkle _at you. Fucking fuck me._

“Don’t overtire the poor girl, Headmaster,” the nurse warned the old man sternly, with an air of weary resignation. The old man nodded gravely in agreement and the nurse bustled off, although Sue thought she heard her mutter something disgruntled under her breath as she departed.

 _Madam Pomfrey,_ she realized. If the man was who Sue thought he was, the nurse couldn’t be anyone else. _Christ. I’ve just been put back together, with_ fucking magic, _by_ Madam _fucking_ Pomfrey, Sue thought, and wondered if this was what “hysterical” felt like.

“Hello. My name is Albus Dumbledore,” the man said kindly, coming closer to Sue’s bedside. He pulled out his wand— _wand_ , Sue thought, _holy fucking God,_ magic _wands—_ and conjured a squashy purple armchair with a casual wave, which he settled into, arranging his beard and robes carefully in his lap before stowing his wand back up his voluminous sleeve.

“You are at Hogwarts,” he continued, brushing away an invisible bit of lint from his knee, “which is a school, of which I am Headmaster. As to what happened to you, we are uncertain. A professor of the school found you while taking an evening stroll and brought you up to the infirmary, as you were quite seriously injured. I wonder if you might tell me your name?”

Sue stared, resisting the urge to actually clean out her ears and ask him to repeat all that. She had heard him quite clearly, even if what he said couldn’t possibly be right.

 _Is_ that _it, then? Have I gone crazy?_ For a long while Sue had thought she might really go insane, but she’d been doing a lot better lately. Why would she break down now, if she hadn’t back then?

The old man—Sue could not quite bring herself to name him, even in her head—leaned forward slightly, a slight crease forming between his bushy, snowy eyebrows. “My dear? Are you all right?”

“Sorry. Yes. No. Well, I don’t know. I did hear you, I just…” Sue trailed off helplessly. “My name is Sue. Sue Smith. Did you really say Hogwarts?” she blurted suddenly, twisting the bedspread viciously between her fingers.

“Are you familiar with that name?” he countered, raising one eyebrow curiously. Sue just stared at him, shaking her head slowly in disbelief. _He would answer a question with a fucking question,_ she thought, and swallowed a hysterical laugh. If she got started, she might not be able to stop.

“You’re Albus Dumbledore. You really are. Christ.” Sue pressed the heels of her hands hard against her eyes for a few seconds and then looked again. Yes, he was still clearly there and as wizardly as ever, though his frown was getting deeper. “Oh my God.”

“I am afraid I have lost the thread of this conversation,” he said calmly, peering at Sue over the tops of his spectacles as if she were a very interesting new species of flora or fauna. “Perhaps if we begin again. I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Smith. My name is indeed Albus Dumbledore, and I am the headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, though something tells me you already knew this. I take it that you are surprised to find yourself here speaking to me. Can you remember anything about what happened before you regained consciousness here, my dear? Specifically, I am very curious as to how you came to be on the Hogwarts grounds, as they are warded both to only permit entry to students and staff and to repel any Muggle who might happen to wander too near. You are familiar with the term ‘Muggle,’ I presume?”

“Yeah,” Sue replied slowly. “It means non-magical human.”

“I’ve gone insane,” she added clearly and calmly, just as the Headmaster opened his mouth to speak again. He stopped, closed his mouth, and waited patiently for her to continue, with a calm and quizzically interested air, as if she had said something like, “I’ve been thinking about raising bees,” instead.

“That’s the only explanation,” Sue added again after a beat, flattening out her handful of crumpled, twisted bedspread only to wad it up again in her fist. “I’ve finally lost it.”

“In my experience, sanity is rather overrated,” Dumbledore said, patting the folds of his robes absently before reaching inside. “Sherbet lemon?” he asked, offering her the open tin.

Sue chuckled weakly. “Sure, okay, why not.”

“They are quite hard on my teeth, I’m afraid, but once one’s teeth are as elderly as mine they are held in one’s head mostly through a combination of magic and fervent wishing regardless,” he remarked as Sue selected a candy. “But I digress. If you do not object, perhaps you could explain why you believe that you and sanity have, for the moment at least, parted ways?”

Sue sucked on the little lemon-shaped candy thoughtfully. “It isn’t that I object exactly, sir,” she finally said, glancing at him from the corner of her eye as she picked at the bedspread draped over her stomach. “It’s more that you won’t believe it, probably. And even if you did believe me, that…might actually be worse.”

“Ah,” Dumbledore replied, folding his hands like a steeple and resting his chin thoughtfully on his fingertips. “Well. Now I am extremely curious.”

Sue fidgeted slightly and picked harder at the bedspread. She wanted to tell him everything, and yet she hesitated. If he was a delusion— _of course he is_ —then talking to him or not talking to him was meaningless.

But what if…Just entertaining the thought was completely delusional too, but what if all of this _was_ real? More importantly, did it matter? If she was being honest, Sue already knew which assumption she was probably going to go with.

“I could not help but notice your accent, my dear,” Dumbledore said suddenly, jolting Sue out of her thoughts. “I hope you will not think me rude when I say that it is _quite_ American.”

Sue chuckled despite herself. “Oh, yessuh,” she replied with an exaggerated drawl, earning a chuckle from the Headmaster as well. “Ah’m from Texas.”

“I have always been fascinated by the regional variations in accents across the United States,” Dumbledore said, offering Sue another sherbet lemon. “So, I take it you were in Texas, then, before you somehow ended up here in Scotland?”

“Well. Maybe,” Sue hedged, chewing her lip again. Dumbledore said nothing, merely raised an eyebrow and waited. “I mean, yes, I was in Texas, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t _your_ Texas. I mean, the Texas that exists here.” Dumbledore’s other eyebrow rose to join its mate.

“I know, it sounds insane and doesn’t make any sense.” Sue sighed.

“I have found that the truth occasionally does,” Dumbledore replied. “And I have had quite a lot of practice at distinguishing truth from lies. I do not think that you are lying to me now, Sue Smith, but I do hope you will explain what you mean.”

“Right,” said Sue. “Thanks. I’ll try.” There was another silence, which Dumbledore patiently sat through, as Sue tried to organize her scattered thoughts. Where could she even begin?

No, that was the wrong question, she realized. Before she could explain anything, she needed some things explained to her first. She had to get her bearings before she could start telling people she came from an alternate dimension and had read about their future in some books for children. If she was ever going to tell anyone, that is. Almost everyone she might tell would think she was totally crazy and not believe her.

Almost everyone, that is, except for the man politely waiting next to her bed for her to speak.

“This will sound like a weird question,” Sue began again. “But, um. What’s the date?”

Dumbledore withdrew a battered golden pocket-watch from somewhere else among the folds of his robes and consulted it briefly. “It is approximately fifteen minutes until midnight on Thursday, the sixth of July, of the year 1995.”

“1995,” Sue repeated. _The summer before Year Five._ “So, Voldemort’s just come back, hasn’t he?” she asked without thinking.

Without appearing to actually move, suddenly Dumbledore was sitting up straighter. His eyes were hard and blue and fixed on Sue’s as if he were trying to see what lay behind them. With a start, Sue remembered that might be just what he was doing, and quickly averted her eyes. She reminded herself of who she was talking to: Dumbledore, who might seem kind but was also quite a dangerous wizard. And the information she had could be dangerous too, in the wrong hands.

Were Dumbledore’s hands the wrong ones? Sue couldn’t be sure. After all, no one _really_ knew Dumbledore, or understood why he did the things he did. And he had done some terrible things to poor Harry, hadn’t he?

“You are correct,” Dumbledore replied gravely. “Although few are ready or willing to accept the truth, I am afraid that Voldemort has indeed returned to life and power. Before you continue, my dear, I regret that I must interject with a question.”

“I’ll answer it if I can, sir,” Sue replied a little warily. She had over three years’ worth of future knowledge over everyone here, if she was right, but if she shared that information, it could be abused. Or, she could end up accidentally disrupting the fragile series of events that the Headmaster had been carefully setting into motion for years, _decades,_ even.

If she did the wrong thing, she could inadvertently cause the Order to fail at protecting the prophecy from Voldemort, for example, or even cause Voldemort to win the war. Sue shuddered. It might all be a delusion, but the stakes felt real enough to her. None of these people knew her at all, but she felt as though they were her dearest friends these days, and all the family she had left, to boot.

“Are you by any chance a time traveler, Miss Smith?”

Sue looked up in surprise. “No. Well, yes and no? It’s complicated,” she hedged, looking away again quickly when he tried to make eye contact. “I am from _the_ future, I guess, technically, but not _your_ future. Just like I’m not from your Texas.” Sue sighed again; this discussion was not doing her sore head any favors.

“I’m afraid I still don’t understand, my dear. Let me rephrase: did you use a Time-Turner to travel to a time different from your own?” Dumbledore asked gently, as if he sensed her growing agitation.

“No,” Sue replied firmly. “Whatever I did, however I got here, it definitely wasn’t with a Time-Turner.”

“I admit, that is a relief. Traveling with a Time-Turner can be extremely dangerous, and has a tendency to make things horribly complicated.”

Sue glanced up again at Dumbledore, being careful to avoid his eyes. Could she trust him with the truth, or at least the bare bones of it? It was risky, but she had to tell someone; she wasn’t equipped to make these calls alone, and Dumbledore was probably the best choice to share her secret with. Assuming he was real, that was.

But it all did seem very real, she thought, as she stroked the cotton weave of her bedsheet with one finger. She had never had a dream with such detail.

 _What am I saying? This is all a dream, or a hallucination. I can’t have fallen into the world of Harry Potter. That’s totally impossible_.

Wasn’t it?

Either Sue’s senses were lying to her and she was actually lying back on Brewer Street, having a very vivid death hallucination, or she was really here. She thought of _American Gods,_ which she had finished not long ago. Neil Gaiman had written something to the effect of: When your senses lie to you, it doesn’t matter because they are still the only information you have to go on.

Sue found herself gnawing her lip again and made herself stop. Her arms were less rubbery and her head no longer hurt quite so badly; the potion must have done its work. She took a deep breath and pulled herself into a sitting position, this time successfully making it upright. Sue took a moment to tuck the covers back around her lap and legs, and leaned back against her pillow and the headboard with a deep sigh, suppressing a yawn.

“Okay.” She peeked at the Headmaster again, absently pushing her unruly hair back from her face with her left hand, and he smiled slightly, as if to encourage her. “Okay. Let’s have a hypothetical discussion, then. If that’s acceptable to you, sir?”

“Very well. Hypothesize at your leisure,” he said, eyes twinkling. Sue sighed.

“Let’s say there is a girl. A girl who’s from…somewhere else. Somewhere way, _way_ else. There’s a lot of differences between, um, here and this other place, even though a lot is the same. It’s farther into the future, for one. And there isn’t magic there, at least not that I—I mean, the girl knows about. Magic would be a lot harder to keep secret where she is from, you see, because everyone has these, um…little personal telephones, that are also cameras, that practically everybody carries around in their pockets, and there are a lot of surveillance cameras mounted in most public places, too. And there’s this, uh, place, where people can send their pictures or their videos, right from their little telephone cameras, so that other people can look at them, almost instantaneously. But that’s not the important part, sorry, I’m rambling.”

“Anyway, about six years ago, this girl started reading these new books, because lots of people were talking about them and they were on the news and all. It was a series, seven books in all, one for each of the main character’s years at this secret boarding school in Scotland for teaching magic.”

Sue paused. Dumbledore had gone very still, and she could feel the weight of his entire attention focused on her and the story she was telling. It was too late to go back now. Even if she didn’t give him any more information, he knew enough now to deduce a great deal of the rest. She swallowed nervously and took a sip of water from the glass on the night stand to soothe her parched throat before she continued.

“Well, right away the girl understood why everyone was raving about these books, because they were really amazing. She read all the ones that were out again and again as she waited for the next book in the series to be published, until finally she’d read them all so much she knew them backward and forward. The only one she hadn’t read to pieces was the last book, the seventh, because it only came out a few months ago, you see. Well, I did read it twice in a row when it came out …Gah, I’m rambling again. Sorry.”

“Perfectly all right, my dear. In your own time and in your own way.”

“Okay. Well, I think you know what the secret boarding school’s name is,” she continued. Dumbledore gave a slight nod.

“And you can probably guess who the main character of the story is, whose career at the magic school it follows.”

“I dare say I could also make a fair guess at the main antagonist of the story as well,” Dumbledore replied, glancing almost slyly at Sue over his spectacles.

“You’re a very smart man, sir. Now do you see what I mean?”

“I am beginning to. However, much is still unclear, for both of us, I imagine. By the by, that is a very interesting tattoo on your left arm,” Dumbledore said, a little too casually.

Sue started and automatically turned her left arm so that the inner part was not visible. “It’s not—I mean, _I’m_ not—it’s…personal,” she stammered lamely. “I’m not a, well, you know. I didn’t get it because I agree with them, or something.”

To her relief, Dumbledore nodded and simply changed the subject. “Perhaps we might put aside the, ah, hypothetical concerns for the moment, and you could describe for me exactly what you remember about how you found yourself suddenly at Hogwarts?”

“I don’t remember much, sir. The last thing I remember was getting hit by a car, in Texas. Then I woke up here.” Sue yawned suddenly, unable to hold it back. She was beginning to feel very sleepy and wished that she could lie back down.

“You were struck by an automobile? That is how you obtained your injuries?” Dumbledore sounded surprised, more so than he had when Sue told him about the books; which seemed fairly, well, Dumbledore-ish of him, when Sue thought about it.

“Yes, sir. I was walking home from work and this lady came out of nowhere. I thought I was dead for sure.”

“If Professor Snape had not discovered you when he did, you might well have been, although I doubt you would have had much satisfaction from being right, which rather takes the fun out of it, doesn’t it?”

Sue choked. “Professor _Snape? He’s_ the one that found me?”

The Headmaster looked at her curiously. “Is that surprising to you?”

“Well, I-I, I…” she stammered, feeling caught wrong-footed without really understanding why. To her horror, Sue felt herself beginning to blush profusely. Now both Dumbledore’s eyebrows went up; he gave her a very knowing and twinkly sort of look. Sue blushed even harder, cursing internally.

“Speaking of Professor Snape, I expect him to return at any moment,” Dumbledore said casually, as if he had just remembered. Suddenly Sue felt wide awake, and also that she would quite like to hide behind something.

“Once he had seen you into Madam Pomfrey’s capable hands, he returned to the grounds to look for any clues as to who might have attacked you, or how you managed to enter the grounds.”

“Oh, right,” Sue said. “People without magic aren’t supposed to be able to find Hogwarts or even see it, are they?”

Dumbledore inclined his head. “However, you would appear to be something of a…special case, my dear. In more ways than one, I suspect.”

“So, Snape—I mean, Professor Snape—is coming up here soon?” Sue said, hearing her voice go higher but finding herself unable to control it. Reflexively, she glanced down at herself and realized she was wearing nothing but an infirmary gown. “Fuck,” she muttered to herself very quietly, feeling her face heat up yet again. Her hair was probably completely fucked too; she reached up surreptitiously to touch it, almost glad there was nothing reflective around to show her just how fucked it actually was. It felt clean, at least; Madam Pomfrey must have done it after she’d treated Sue’s head wound.

“If you would prefer, I could head him off at the doors and steer him clear? You do need your rest, my dear. I am surprised the good Madam Pomfrey has not yet come out to chastise me with those very words.”

“No! I mean, yes! I mean. What? Gahh, what’s _wrong_ with me?” Sue cried, clutching her head in dismay. If she couldn’t even make a complete sentence just _talking_ about him with someone else, what was she going to do with Snape in the same room as her? Just the thought of it made Sue feel both cold and flushed at the same time, not to mention a healthy dose of self-disgust at how silly she was being.

“Fuck,” she blurted again, much more loudly this time, and winced at the way Dumbledore’s eyes widened slightly. “Sorry.”

“No need, my dear,” he replied, mustache twitching suspiciously once more. “I assure you my ears are hardly innocent. As for what is wrong, I would remind you that you took quite a sizable knock to the head. It is understandable for you to feel confused and anxious.”

Before Sue could reply, the infirmary door opened. Sue quickly covered the tattoo on her forearm with the bedspread. If she wasn’t up to explaining it to Dumbledore, she definitely wasn’t up to explaining it to—anyone else.

“Headmaster,” the man entering said by way of greeting. Sue froze, staring fixedly at her lap. She had never heard that voice, but she knew it immediately, like the voice of someone she knew when she was small, but had almost forgotten. Every hair on her body seemed to suddenly stand at quivering attention.

Wishing her face wasn’t still so red, Sue looked up.

 


	3. Introductions

 

_And we all knew he was broken pretty bad_  
 _So we gave him what we had_  
 _We cleared a space for him to sleep in_  
 _And we let the silence that's our trademark make its presence felt_  
  
 _Come on in, we haven't slept for weeks_  
 _Drink some of this, it'll put color in your cheeks._

\--The Mountain Goats, _Color in Your Cheeks_

 

Severus stood on the dark Hogwarts lawn, scowling, deep in thought. He could not determine how or why the girl in the infirmary had arrived on the school grounds, in the perfect place and at the perfect moment for him to discover her and preserve her life. He did not like not knowing.

When the Mark first began to darken, Severus had taken the precaution of adding his own personal trace to the wards over the castle and grounds; if the girl had been let in by anyone within Hogwarts, he would have known immediately. To have located the Hogwarts grounds, the girl must have magic; but even if she was a witch, Severus still could not see how she passed through the wards and onto the grounds without the help of a teacher or the Headmaster, and without detection from any of the school’s other many security measures.

Certainly the Headmaster knew what Severus had done; though he had not bothered to ask permission, Dumbledore had chosen not to comment on it. He was more than capable of undoing Severus’s trace without his knowledge, but Severus could not see how it would profit him.

How then, had the girl ended up broken, bleeding, and near death on the Hogwarts lawn? Her attacker might have brought her here somehow, but he doubted the attack had actually taken place at Hogwarts; the girl had probably been dumped on the lawn by her would-be murderer after the fact. All the evidence seemed to suggest that the violence inflicted on the girl had taken place somewhere other than the Hogwarts grounds; the only obviously disturbed place he could find on the lawns or along the edge of the Forest was the place he had originally found her, and he could find no trail leading either to or away from that spot.

Nor did he find any trace of any other person, save the girl herself, whose blood still stained the grass where her head had rested. Other than the bloodstain, the grass was hardly disturbed even here. Perhaps the attack had taken place somewhere farther north of the castle—that might explain the girl’s unseasonably warm outerwear. But why attempt to kill a girl somewhere secluded, only to risk being caught by dumping her still-breathing body on the grounds of a highly secure magical school?

On a whim Severus tried summoning her wand, but whoever attacked the woman must have taken it with them, if indeed she had one. Or, she might have charmed her wand to be resistant to Summoning Charms, as Severus himself had done. The girl had been missing a shoe as well, Severus remembered, but when he tried summoning that, it too failed to appear.

Of course, an attempted murderer with magical ability and a modicum of cleverness could reasonably explain all of the oddities in the evidence. Still, Severus did not like it. It was bizarre, and his first instinct was to treat even the mildly out-of-the-ordinary as potentially deadly, given his horribly precarious position as a double—well, triple actually, he supposed—agent. The object of this whole incident might be merely to persuade them to trust the girl, by making her a sympathetic victim in need of protection. Perhaps there was no assailant at all; it was possible, though admittedly unlikely, that the girl inflicted those injuries on herself to deflect suspicion.

At any rate, Severus had learned all he could from out here. Next he would need to question the girl herself. She was obviously a few years past student-age, though still young; hopefully interrogating her would not be as irritating as talking to one of his teenage charges, although Severus did not hold out hope for much more than that.

By now Pomfrey ought to be finished mending the girl’s bones and closing up her wounds. The Headmaster was most likely conducting his own special brand of questioning at this very moment. Severus returned to the castle and headed straight for the infirmary.

When Severus entered the infirmary, he found Albus sitting at the girl’s bedside, just as he had predicted. “Headmaster,” he greeted him quietly, but his eyes were on the girl, who had gone stiff as a board at the sound of his voice. She was staring down at her hands in her lap as if she would like to be hiding her face with them, but instead she slowly turned her face up towards him.

Their eyes met and locked. He had been expecting the girl’s eyes to be blue, he realized, perhaps because of her pale hair, but they were actually a tawny color, more bronze than brown, almost like a cat’s eyes; they were wide and bright and framed by colourless, almost translucent eyelashes and eyebrows as pale as the rest of her hair.

Severus forgot to even attempt to look into the girl’s thoughts at the sight of her expression as they stared into one another’s eyes. Her cheeks were flushed pink, making the dusting of brown freckles across her cheekbones and nose stand out in greater relief against her golden skin. If he hadn’t seen it for himself, it would be difficult to believe that she had been near death not three hours before. Her face was pinched; he did not need Legilimency to see that she was tense and anxious; her bottom lip was swollen from being gnawed on, and her hands had worried at the bedspread, leaving crumpled spots here and there where her hands had twisted the fabric back and forth, again and again. What might be making her so anxious?

Severus wondered. Whatever this girl was, she was no spy; of that much he was certain. No one could fake an expression that guileless. Though their moment of eye contact lasted no more than a few seconds, he could not fail to miss the way her pupils dilated noticeably as she stared back. He blinked in surprise, and the girl quickly looked away, flustered; to his amazement, the rosy flush in her cheeks darkened to a hot, embarrassed blush.

The blood had all been cleaned away by the nurse, Severus noticed; though still wild, her hair no longer looked like matted straw. Instead it stuck out from her head in all directions, an odd mix of wavy tendrils, ringlets, and tightly kinked strands. Her hair was just as pale by lamplight as by moonlight, yet even in the warmer lighting Severus hesitated to name it blonde; it was too grey and too brown; closer to ivory or bone, streaked liberally with darker strands of dun brown and silvery highlights here and there. It was rather as if someone had sculpted an artistic representation of a Devil’s Snare out of many shades of pale-colored hair, then stuck it upon her head.

“Good evening, Severus. Allow me to introduce you to our guest, Miss Sue Smith. Miss Smith, allow me to introduce Professor Severus Snape, Potions Master and Head of Slytherin House.”

Severus inclined his head silently. The girl glanced back up long enough to smile awkwardly at him, blinking rapidly, before she averted her eyes again. Her mouth opened and then closed quickly, as if she had planned to respond but lost her nerve. Severus suppressed a sigh. This interrogation was going to be quite tedious after all, if the girl was such a mouse that she couldn’t even bring herself to speak out loud to him.

“Miss Smith and I were discussing how she came to be here at Hogwarts,” the Headmaster informed him, conjuring a second squashy armchair, this one an eye-watering lemon yellow, and inviting Severus to sit. Severus pretended not to notice the chair or the gesture and after a moment Dumbledore vanished it with an expression of good humor.

“She has informed me that she is indeed a Muggle, as we suspected, and although she has experience with magic, she has no friends or family connected to Hogwarts who might be able to shed any light on the problem.”

“Yes, I was hoping to question Miss Smith about her reasons for trespassing onto school property without permission,” Severus replied in a cool, dispassionate tone. The girl twitched slightly, but she glanced at Dumbledore first; he gave her a tiny nod that she returned before turning to Severus to answer.

“I didn’t trespass,” the girl objected, then stopped. “Well, I did trespass, technically, but it wasn’t my idea. I didn’t decide to come here, it just…happened.”

Severus stared at the girl, noting her accent but keeping his face totally blank and his eyes narrow and unwavering on hers. Immediately she shifted her gaze down to his shoulder, but she glanced up again almost immediately to meet his eye.

“It’s the truth, Professor Snape. And please, call me Sue,” she added in one breath, then flushed horribly, looking away and down as if to hide her blushing face.

“Miss Smith,” Severus replied coldly. “Are you claiming to have been brought here against your will?”

Dumbledore gave a polite cough. “Excuse me, dear boy.”

Severus took a deep breath. “Yes, Headmaster?” he answered stonily, keeping the snarl out of his voice with a serious effort.

“It appears that we were operating under a misapprehension. Apparently Miss Smith was not attacked, per se; she was the victim of an automobile accident, which is how she came by her many injuries.”

“An automobile accident,” Severus replied flatly, staring at Dumbledore, who appeared unaffected. Severus cut his eyes to the girl instead. “In the middle of a grass meadow. On a property that a Muggle should not be able to even _see_ , let alone wander onto at night to make herself at home,” he continued, his tone growing harder until he finished almost in a hiss. The color fled the girl’s cheeks, but she set her jaw firmly and raised her chin high.

“I didn’t say the accident happened here. I was walking home from work and the car drifted across the road and hit me broadside. When I woke up, I was here in this bed. That’s all I know, and all I remember,” the girl said. Her voice was a tad wobbly, but she looked him in the eye, and this time she did not look away. Wordlessly, Severus cast the spell, and then he was falling into her eyes. Images, voices, snatches of memory, all slid by him, like an ever-present current of remembrances. He saw a pair of headlights bearing down, far too close; they spun and pointed away, but still the car kept coming, and then there was a terrible scream. The girl’s body flew through the air, visible as no more than a dark silhouette—

And then there was someone standing behind him, just out of his peripheral view, and he began to turn, thinking it might be the culprit he was trying to find—

“No!” cried the girl, and suddenly Severus found himself pushed out of her mind. She had clapped a hand over her eyes, breaking the eye contact. If he had been using his wand to cast _Legilimens_ , she could not have repelled him so easily, but without the extra power of a wand, eye contact was essential.

“Severus,” said Dumbledore in a warning tone that made Severus’s mouth go dry; although he pretended he was unaffected, he subsided nonetheless, twisting his face into a scowl and crossing his arms tightly over his chest.

“No, it’s alright,” the girl interjected quickly, giving the Headmaster an earnest look. “I made eye contact so that he could see for himself. I just didn’t want him to see what he found next.” Her eyes flicked toward his face and away; the roses were back in her cheeks, but she was still stiff with anxiety and tension.

“Something to hide, Miss Smith?” Severus asked in a smooth, oily tone, smiling unpleasantly at her, although beneath that he was genuinely baffled; she had known about his abilities and _deliberately_ made eye-contact to allow him to use them upon her? Was she foolish, or did she actually trust him even to such a degree as allowing him to push his way into her mind? He remembered her pupils expanding as the blush suffused her face, and wondered again.

“It’s Sue. And everyone’s got something to hide, Snape. It was personal, okay?” the girl retorted rather sharply. Severus had to resist letting his surprise at her forcefulness show, maintaining his impassive façade with a conscious effort.

“And when you were hit by the automobile, where were you, precisely?” Severus pressed, changing his tack.

“I was walking home. In Texas,” the girl answered, but her eyes cut briefly to Dumbledore even as she said it. Severus felt a little prickle from the alligator part of his brain, the sense he could always rely on to tell him whether someone was being honest or dishonest, tingling in warning. The girl wasn’t lying to him exactly, Severus thought, but she was obviously holding something back, and it was equally obvious that Dumbledore knew what it was.

“I see,” Severus said, voice heavy with irony. “You were hit by a lorry in Texas, and somehow woke up on private property in Scotland, with no memory of how you got from one place to the other, and no trace left behind to give any clues either. And you expect us to accept this story.”

“Not a lorry, a car,” she corrected him. “Professor Dumbledore believes me,” the girl countered, but her hands began twisting up the bedspread again; Severus thought she was not even aware that she was doing it.

“The Headmaster frequently believes many things that I choose to disagree with,” Severus replied with indifference. Dumbledore gave an odd cough that did not quite disguise the chuckle he had accidentally let loose, which Severus suspected was deliberate, but chose to ignore it.

“Please, Professor Snape,” she said beseechingly. She locked eyes with him again, not even blinking, but instead of slipping into her memories, Severus waited, and watched in bemusement as her pupils dilated again. She could only be responding to one stimulus in both cases—himself.

Interesting.

“It’s the truth. I swear it,” the girl was saying, still staring into his eyes intently. Most people did not like to hold his gaze for so long, even when they did not know about his special skill; they found his stare too intense and became uncomfortable, but there was no sign of that in the girl. To be sure, she did not look as though she was comfortable at all, but it was a different sort of discomfort, like a son embarrassed by a mother’s public affection, or—

Or a young girl interacting with an older male that she fancied.

Severus was momentarily stunned by this deduction, and almost missed what the girl said next.

“—doesn’t make sense, I know. And you have no reason to trust me. But I’m on your side. Always.” Her cheeks were pink with mortification again, but she did not look away this time. Severus felt a brief, begrudging admiration for the girl, which he quickly tried to forget had ever happened, as if it were instead a brief bout of insanity. Her ridiculous, juvenile affections had nothing to do with him, no matter how much she might fancy that she fancied him.

In Severus’s experience, women liked to fantasize about having a dark and tortured lover, but were put off by the unlovely reality of just trying to get along with an angry, cruel, sharp-tongued misanthrope, let alone develop and maintain a romantic attachment to such a person.

It would be best—not kind, but best for them both—if he nipped this little affair of the heart in the bud, before the girl wasted any more time and effort on having these feelings for the most inappropriate person imaginable. A few cutting remarks and choice insults, delivered with his customary sneer of disdain, should cure her of any notion that he was misunderstood and merely in need of affection and companionship from the right woman.

Severus looked down at the girl, letting his lip curl in ultimate contempt. She faltered slightly, even leaned away from him in her bed, and he watched with satisfaction (and something else that he tamped down and did not acknowledge, though it was most definitely not satisfaction) as bewilderment gave way to hurt in her expression.

“And what could have possessed you to think that a magic-less, Muggle _girl_ would be a valuable addition to my _side_ , as you so eloquently put it?”

But watching her face, Severus had the uneasy feeling that his plan was about to backfire spectacularly. The girl’s hurt had morphed quickly into anger, but her voice was calm as she replied.

“I guess not much, if you put it that way. I just thought you might want a friend you could trust. I admire you and I’d like to help you, if I can. That’s all,” she said softly, still fixing him with her amber eyes. Severus turned sharply away from her gaze, unsettled. He wanted to scoff, but could not. She was too sincere. It was obvious she meant every word, and he was left feeling about four inches tall and bitterly angry, for reasons he did not wish to examine too closely.

The Headmaster chose this moment to interrupt. “I believe Sue needs her rest, Severus. Let us adjourn to my office, if you’d be so kind?”

“I am not finished interrogating Miss Smith,” Severus said through gritted teeth. He wanted to get to the bottom of this, with real answers, but yet again Dumbledore was attempting to put him off, with vague reassurances that all was being taken care of and it would after all be better for him not to know.

Dumbledore smiled, as if he knew exactly what Severus was thinking. “I’m afraid you will have to pick up your discussion with Miss Smith another time, dear boy. The potion Madam Pomfrey gave to her seems to have had a soporific effect,” he replied, gesturing at the girl. Severus turned to see that she had dozed off in the middle of their conversation; she was still half upright, her head bent forward on her chest, but her steady breathing testified that she was fast asleep. Anyone else he would have suspected of shamming, but the girl had proved that she had no guile.

It was no matter, Severus told himself. He would get to the bottom of whatever secrets she might have to hide soon enough.

_______________________________________________________________

 

“I take it you do believe the girl’s story then, as she claimed?” Severus said at last, breaking the silence between them since they had left the sleeping girl in the infirmary and retired to the Headmaster’s office.

“I do, Severus,” Dumbledore replied gently. “I think that you do as well, but are simply unwilling to admit as such. She has not tried to lie to us yet, I think, but it is still painfully obvious that deception does not come naturally to her.”

Severus gave a begrudging nod. “But she is hiding something. And you know what it is,” he added accusingly. Dumbledore sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose where his spectacles rested. Settling his glasses back into place, he met Severus’s eye. As always, Severus ruthlessly suppressed the urge to shiver. Dumbledore had a way of making one feel as though he was looking at the very bottom of one’s soul, and he never hesitated to use that skill on Severus.

“I would say that it is nothing for you to concern yourself with, but I know that will not satisfy you. And I suspect it would also be a lie.”

Severus tried to conceal his surprise. “Then you will tell me?”

“In good time. I do not understand everything myself yet. But if what I suspect is true, Miss Smith may prove to be an invaluable ally for the Order.”

Severus narrowed his eyes. “Explain, sir.”

Dumbledore’s mustache twitched suspiciously, and Severus scowled. So he was to be put off after all.

“I cannot explain yet, dear boy. Besides, I think that Miss Smith will be better able to explain it herself. When she is ready to share what she knows, I would like you to be there. She trusts you. More than she trusts myself, I believe.”

Severus felt his eyebrows rise despite himself. “You believe that the girl will be more willing to talk to me than to you?” That was difficult to believe. People generally found Dumbledore very trustworthy, while they usually found himself the opposite. Especially after the way he had disparaged her, why should she trust him?

“I think she is more likely to be forthcoming if you are present, yes. You may have noticed, she feels some sort of…affinity towards you. But that is only to an extent; she fears the consequences of sharing her knowledge. If she knows what I suspect she may know, it is essential to the Order that we earn her trust. I will also try to speak with her alone, and I encourage you to do the same. She could be a very valuable ally to you personally, my dear boy.”

“I do not see how.”

Dumbledore smiled again, this time with sadness, Severus noted. “I know you do not. But perhaps you will.”

“I also think that Miss Smith ought to be moved immediately to the Order headquarters,” Dumbledore continued in a more businesslike tone, folding his hands neatly on top of his desk.

“Do you really think that is necessary? Hogwarts is quite secure,” Severus said doubtfully, although not because he disagreed; he wanted to draw out the Headmaster’s own reasoning.

“It is secure, but we cannot hope to keep her presence a secret here. I think Sue will be safer somewhere that no one can locate her, and the fewer who know about her, the better. And she must be kept safe; her life would be forfeit should anyone untrustworthy discover what she knows.”

Severus inclined his head, thoughts whirling. What could the girl know? It had to do with the Dark Lord, Dumbledore’s hints all but promised that, but what secrets could a young Muggle girl know that the Dark Lord might kill to possess? Or kill to prevent her from telling?

“I would like you to escort Miss Smith to the house yourself, as soon as Madam Pomfrey releases her,” Dumbledore instructed. “I have a prior engagement that cannot wait, but she can be no safer with anyone than with you at her side. Perhaps you could make a quick detour to pick up some clothing and whatever else the young lady may need? Somewhere in Muggle London, where you are not likely to be recognized or run into other wizards.”

Severus scowled. “I have better things to do with my time than babysit a Muggle girl and take her on a shopping trip. But I will do as you ask, Headmaster,” he amended when Dumbledore frowned. He still felt the need to offer up some resistance occasionally, even if they both knew it was only a token expression.

“Thank you Severus. That will be all, I think.”

“And Severus?” Dumbledore called him back just as he was about to close the office door behind him. “I would also ask you to be kind, or as kind as you can manage. She is no doubt frightened, and anxious about what will happen to her now that she has been thrown into our paths.”

Severus did not bother to respond. But the Headmaster’s words stayed with him throughout the long walk to his quarters in the dungeons. So did the girl’s, though he tried to put them out of his thoughts. Her earnest, worried face kept popping up again and again in his mind’s eye, framed by the wild snarl of her pale locks.

It was far more relevant, and more interesting, to consider her possible motives or background, but what little he knew was puzzling and difficult to make any solid deductions from. Thus, he found himself dwelling on her physical appearance instead. She was not beautiful by any stretch of the word, but in her features there was something…compelling. Perhaps it was her odd coloring, or her equally odd eyes.

Or that hair. The only way the girl’s hair could have been more mad-looking was if it had been made of snakes like the Medusa’s, he thought wryly.

 _She admires me,_ he thought later, in the privacy of his rooms, as he sipped at one last cup of tea before bed. _No,_ he corrected. _Admired._ He had surely put paid to any such feelings by the way he had spoken to her tonight _._ But it was odd, now that he gave it a second thought; how could she admire him? She could not possibly know anything of him, of who he was.

Severus flung his teacup suddenly into the fireplace with a snarl. The cup exploded, spraying shards of porcelain everywhere.

It made him feel slightly better, but only for a moment.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit: I just realized that I'd forgotten to title this chapter, so I fixed that, even though it's not a very inspired title.
> 
> Also, I remembered that I'd forgotten to address Sue's missing shoe in the next chapter, and it was driving me crazy so I fixed that too.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	4. A Trip to London

_Hello teacher tell me what's my lesson_   
_Look right through me_   
_Look right through me_   
_And I find it kind of funny_   
_I find it kind of sad_   
_The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had_   
_I find it hard to tell you_   
_'Cos I find it hard to take_   
_When people run in circles it's a very very_   
_Mad world_

 -Tears for Fears, _Mad World_

 

When Sue awoke the next morning, for a wild moment she could not remember where she was or how she had gotten there; she sat up in a panic, but all she could see was white curtains drawn around her unfamiliar bed. Then everything came back at once, and she fell back onto her pillow with a heavy sigh.

It had not been all a dream then. She was still here.

At Hogwarts.

Sue rubbed at her eyes and groaned. What was she going to do? If she was insane, then she was probably actually in a hospital somewhere in Texas, in a coma maybe, or in a catatonic state, and this was all some delusion. But if she wasn’t crazy, if she was really here…

Not only was she in another country that she knew almost nothing about, without any papers or her passport and without any local currency, but she was also, somehow, in another time, another dimension even. Where everything and everyone from _Harry Potter_ actually existed. Where Harry Potter himself existed! Where would he be right now, she wondered? Probably still at Privet Drive, cooling his heels and waiting for the Order to finally collect him.

Sue sat up again with a start at the thought. If Harry Potter was still at Privet Drive, then any moment that horrible bitch Umbridge might be sending dementors to attack him and any unlucky bastards that happened to be nearby. She’d have to warn someone.

Suddenly Sue heard footsteps approaching; the curtain around her bed was drawn back briskly to reveal Madam Pomfrey, looking vaguely pleased.

“Good, you’re awake. And how are you feeling?” the nurse asked as she finished drawing the curtains around the bed back to the wall, exposing the rest of the infirmary to Sue’s view. It was completely empty, with the morning sun shining cheerily in through the large leaded glass windows on the southern wall.

“Better. Much better,” Sue replied, smiling. Yesterday, she’d been fatally struck by a car, but now she felt perfectly healthy.

Magic was awesome.

Madam Pomfrey nodded, but took out her wand anyway to confirm Sue’s health for herself. She cast the same spell as the night before, and after a brief look dismissed the glowing lines with another wand wave.

“Good as new, I’d say. I will let the Headmaster know you’re ready to be released.”

Sue opened her mouth to ask where she was being released to, but stopped at the sound of more footsteps, from the direction of the infirmary doors.

“Good morning Severus,” Madam Pomfrey said pleasantly, looking over Sue’s shoulder, and Sue was suddenly too busy trying to swallow her heart and coax it back where it belonged to speak. She nearly groaned out loud, but managed to keep her expression relatively calm when she turned to greet Snape.

At least she hoped she looked calm. “Hello. Good morning,” she said. Her hand came up in an awkward little wave, and she put it hastily back down, blushing even more deeply.

Snape did not acknowledge either greeting. “I have come to collect Miss Smith, if she is well enough to leave,” Snape said as he approached Sue’s bed. He was dressed in black, of course, but instead of the teaching robes he had worn last night, he was wearing a pair of slacks with a razor-sharp crease and a suit jacket over a crisp white shirt, buttoned all the way to the throat, but without a tie. His limp black hair hung loose, hooked behind both ears to keep it back from his face.

Sue had a sudden urge to fidget and repressed it, but she couldn’t hold back her blush. After the way she’d acted around him last night, he probably thought she was some kind of idiot.

She realized belatedly that she didn’t remember the professor or the Headmaster taking their leave last night. Had she fallen asleep right in front of them?

_Of course he thinks I’m some kind of idiot. I_ am _some kind of idiot._

“Well, Madam Pomfrey?” Snape asked brusquely.

Madam Pomfrey tutted. “Yes, yes, very well. You may collect Miss Smith, if you must.” Shaking her head, she bustled away. Sue thought she heard her mutter something about “wouldn’t kill you to be polite for a change” and fought a grin.

“Get dressed, Miss Smith. I am to take you to London for any necessities you will require and then to a safe location where you will remain until it is safe for you to leave it,” Snape said. He pulled the curtains closed briskly without waiting for her reply.

Sue frowned, but she hopped out of bed. That explained his change in attire, then. Her own clothes had apparently been cleaned of blood; they were folded in a neat pile on the foot of her bed, and she quickly swapped her infirmary gown for them, thinking hard. Snape was taking her to London. No, Dumbledore had _ordered_ Snape to take her to London. That meant that they probably intended to keep her at Grimmauld Place. For how long?

Sue patted her hair; she briefly wished for a mirror, but decided it was probably better not to know. Before she opened the curtains again, she put on her coat. It was too warm for it, but her blouse had short sleeves that didn’t cover her forearms, and she didn’t want Snape seeing her tattoo. Not yet.

Possibly not ever.

Sue yanked the curtains back and stepped out smartly to meet Snape. He was peering suspiciously out the window at the bright morning sky, as if he expected something sinister to come flying out of it at any moment. Perhaps he did, Sue thought, and wasn’t sure whether she was amused or saddened.

Snape turned to meet her eye, his lip curling slightly in disdain. Sue felt her cheeks get hot yet again and suppressed a flinch. His face was exactly as she had seen it last night, when the car hit her: tired and angry and worn, not at all handsome; but also, somehow, beautiful.

_I’m doomed,_ Sue thought unhappily. _Completely, utterly fucking doomed._

“Good morning,” she said again, then winced at her own inanity. Snape made no reply; the curl of his lip deepened.

"Are you ready to leave?"

"Nearly. Only I just realized I only have one shoe," Sue replied apologetically.

Snape glanced at her single remaining shoe with narrowed eyes; then, he produced his wand. With a wave, he made a mate to her shoe pop into existence in his other hand and handed it silently to Sue. She put it on; it was a perfect fit.

"Thanks," she said lamely. Snape said nothing, merely gestured her silently towards the door. She went, and he followed close behind.

In the corridor, she waited for him as he closed the door behind them, peering around with interest. There was a tapestry on the wall next to the infirmary doors of a medieval witch, tending a man with a sword and shield who was wrapped all up in bandages, so that only his eyes and a bit of hair showed.

The witch in the tapestry looked up at Sue and winked. Sue grinned in delight.

“Tried to slay a dragon, don’t you know,” the witch murmured conspiratorially to Sue, her eyes full of amusement. “Men can be so silly.”

Before Sue could reply, Snape swept past her.

“Follow,” he barked, and Sue jumped to obey before she could think better of it. After trying to keep up with his longer legs for one corridor, two flights of stairs, and half of another corridor, she had had enough.

“Hold on,” she called a little breathlessly. “I can’t walk as fast as you can. One of your legs is like, two of mine. And,” she continued boldly when he slowed his stride slightly, “you don’t have to talk to me so rudely either. I’m a person, you know, not a dog you order to heel.”

Snape stopped, turned, and looked at her impassively. Sue, already flushed from trying to keep up, felt herself flush harder, but she did not look away. After a moment, Snape gave a slight nod.

“Apologies,” he said, so quietly that Sue almost didn’t hear. But he did walk more slowly. “Thank you,” she replied warmly, but his face was turned away so she didn’t see what reaction, if any, he had to that.

With their pace reduced, Sue was able to look around at the castle as they passed through. It was somehow everything she had imagined and much, much more. Great gothic arches of stone soared overhead; beautiful leaded windows let in sunlight, and where there were no windows, actual torches illuminated the corridors. And of course, the statues and the portraits and the tapestries that they passed, each more strange and obviously magical than the last. Sue was so dazzled, she could hardly take it all in. If she had been with Dumbledore, she might have asked if there was time for a quick tour, but with Snape she did not dare.

But as they reached the infamous moving staircases and rode them down to the Great Hall’s grand staircase in silence, Sue could not find it in herself to feel much regret. Even a brief walk through the real, one and only Hogwarts castle was more than she had ever hoped for, _could_ have ever hoped for. It would have to be enough, she thought with a sigh as the last staircase touched down to the corridor and she followed Snape off.

Sue was so absorbed thinking about the castle around her and her great luck, she did not notice Snape’s sidelong glance at her.

“Do you require breakfast?” he asked abruptly; Sue started and turned to him, silently cursing the damned blush that once _again_ flooded her cheeks. “We cannot stop in the Great Hall, as your presence here is supposed to remain secret for now, but once we are in London we may stop somewhere briefly. If you like.”

Sue stared at him. After the evening before, she had expected him to ignore her as much as possible, yet here he was, asking her if she wanted _breakfast._ Politely too, even.

“Oh. Um, sure,” she stammered. “I mean, uh, I’m not much of a breakfast eater, but maybe we could get some coffee? Do you like coffee?”

Sue shut her mouth with a snap and winced inwardly. She was being so _awkward_ , she couldn’t understand it. This was her greatest wish, but now she was ruining it. What was _wrong_ with her, anyway? She’d never acted like this around anyone, ever.

And now Snape was staring at her, one eyebrow raised. “That would be…acceptable,” he said neutrally, and Sue winced for real this time.

She forgot her embarrassment for a moment though, when they arrived in the Great Hall.

“Wow,” she murmured under her breath. The ceiling was easily the highest she had ever seen, and she turned around to look up at where the huge, wide marble staircase they had descended split off to the left and right and imagined herself as an eleven year old, standing here with trepidation in her heart, waiting to be Sorted. Sue smiled.

There was a great creaking sound behind her; Sue turned to see the entrance hall doors swinging open seemingly of their own accord, with Snape standing nearby waiting none too patiently for her to catch up.

As they went out onto the green, sunlit grounds and onto the well-ordered, packed dirt path that led from the castle to the gates, Sue asked Snape,

“How will we be getting to London?”

“We will Apparate. I assume you know what that is,” he replied. He seemed distracted; his eyes darted all around, as if he was looking for a threat. Sue couldn’t manage to internalize his paranoia; the morning was too sunny and blue and perfect.

“Can you apparate all the way from here to London, then?” When he looked at her, she amended hastily, “I mean ‘you’ in a general sense, not _you,_ specifically. Can wizards apparate that far?”

“Some can. We will be Apparating in jumps, as long-distance Apparition is risky with a passenger.”

“How many jumps?”

“Four in all.”

They walked in silence, as Sue tried to think of a topic of conversation that Snape might not find too tedious.

“I’ve never been to London,” she tried. “I drove through London, Texas once. If you blinked, you’d miss it.”

But this line of conversation was a mistake; it reminded her of the long drive from her old home to the crooked little house in Laving, and a hot lump of sadness swelled up in her throat, making further conversation impossible.

“I have never been to Texas,” Snape said after a moment. “Nor any of the States.”

Sue swallowed down her grief and took a deep breath, but she still could not manage a sensible reply. Snape glanced at her oddly, but did not comment.

They reached the gates; Sue craned her neck to stare up at the huge stone sculptures of winged boars that flanked it on either side, perched on lofty pillars of the same stone. At Snape’s touch, the heavy wrought iron swung silently open, and then closed just as quietly behind them. Away from the gates, Sue saw that the path continued downhill to a small village, which could only be Hogsmeade. Between the castle and the village, the path was joined by a wider road that curved back around the castle grounds, which Sue thought must lead to the train station where the Hogwarts Express would disembark.

“Take my arm, and hold on tightly,” Snape commanded, offering his black-clad arm to her. Sue felt all of the blood in her head rush to her face and willed her hand not to tremble as she wrapped it around his forearm.

Before she had time to blink, or breathe, they were off.

_______________________________________________________________

Sue remembered Harry observing once that Wizarding methods of travel all seemed to be distinctly uncomfortable. As they touched down finally in London, where Sue promptly fell to her knees, her stomach rising unhappily to somewhere just below her tonsils, she was inclined to think he had a point. She had been alright on the first jump, when they had materialized in a stand of oaks near the top of a windswept hill, although the squeezing sensation that went with passing instantly from one place to another was rather unpleasant. But by the third jump to a deserted meadow filled with the riotous blooms of wildflowers, she was quite glad that she had not eaten any breakfast.

When her stomach had returned reluctantly to its normal position, Sue looked up to see that Snape was extending a hand to help her up; a crease that might have signified either worry or irritation had appeared between his dark brows. Sue took it gratefully and climbed to her feet, brushing a bit of dirt from her knees with her free hand.

They had arrived in a dim, crooked cobbled alley, quiet and empty of people or traffic.

“There is a café not far from here, just up this street and down on the left,” Snape told her, gesturing at the mouth of the alley. “We shall stop there.”

The café’s seating was primarily al fresco; the waiter showed them to a little table separated from the street only by a diminutive fence, topped with planters overflowing with begonias in a wide assortment of colors. Her stomach was still too unsettled to think of eating, so Snape ordered a pot of strong breakfast tea for them both.

“You did well,” he commented as he filled first her cup and then his own when the tea arrived. “For a first time Apparating, four jumps over four hundred miles is a bit much. Many people could not have stomached it.”

“It was a close thing there at the end,” Sue admitted, sipping delicately at her scalding-hot cup and breathing the steam curling up from the liquid deeply. She watched Snape drink from his own cup and noted that he took no sugar or milk, just as she did.

“You said we are to pick up necessities? I’m assuming clothes and toiletries, but is there anything else?”

“That is all for now, unless there is something you require that doesn’t fall under those categories. If we miss something or you find that you need something else later, I imagine someone will be willing to escort you out to run an errand or two,” he replied.

“We’re going to Grimmauld Place, aren’t we?” Sue asked, despite her trepidation.

Snape froze, then very slowly put down his cup of tea.

“Explain how you know that name, and where or from whom you learned it. Immediately,” he said in a low voice, fixing her with his dark, hard eyes. Sue swallowed.

“I could try. But not here. I don’t think you’ll believe it, anyway.”

Snape frowned at her heavily, and she looked down at her teacup, fiddling with the handle.

“Very well,” he finally said, and drained his cup. Sue took a hasty gulp of her own tea and nearly choked. It was still too hot. Snape took a few paper notes from his pocket and stuck them under the teapot and they left, not waiting for the waiter to bring the bill.

Several blocks from the café, there was a row of shops, one of which sold secondhand clothing, if the large green sign with “Secondhand Clothing” painted on it in tall white letters was to be believed, anyway.

“Here will be fine,” Sue said, tapping Snape’s arm and pointing to the shop when he turned. Snape nodded and held the door for her as they went inside.

A bell tinkled faintly somewhere within as the stepped out of the bright street into the relative gloom of the shop. A woman with a great deal of sleek silvery hair piled in a bun atop her head peered out from a dim doorway at the back.

“Ring when you’re ready, or if you need anything, dears,” she said wearily, gesturing with her chin at an old-fashioned brass bellhop bell on the counter by the register, then ducked back through the doorway.

Sue walked through the rows of clothing, inhaling the smell of dust, mothballs, and a faint whiff of coffee as she trailed her fingers over the neatly hanging garments. She suspected Dumbledore was the one footing the bill for this little shopping trip and that he could probably afford the expense, but she didn’t want to spend too much nonetheless. Sue liked clothes and liked to dress well, but she wasn’t overly fussy and actually liked buying secondhand when she could.

Snape waited for her by the counter as she browsed quickly and efficiently. She wasn’t sure how long she would be remaining here (she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to get back either, now that she thought of it, but that was perhaps better not to worry about just now), so she decided to get enough clothes for two weeks’ worth of outfits, selecting only garments that could be washed easily so that she wouldn’t have to go out and buy more if the opportunity did not come again after all.

When she had an armload of likely clothes, Sue headed for the dressing room to try them on, but she was brought up short by a mannequin wearing the coolest dress she had ever seen. It fit her requirement of long sleeves, and also had a heart-shaped scoop neckline and a slightly flared knee-length skirt, both her favorite styles in dresses. But the best part about it was the fabric; it was nice and thick, with a sketch-like pattern of realistic bunnies, some standing up on hind legs and sniffing, some squatting on all four feet or curled up asleep, some frozen mid-hop, over a powder-blue background.

Sue was still staring enviously at the dress when Snape spoke from just behind her, making her jump.

“Are you waiting for it to take itself off the mannequin, Miss Smith?”

Sue flushed. “Sorry, I’m almost done. Just need to try these on,” she mumbled, returning to her previous course.

“Aren’t you going to take this one with you?” he asked, gesturing at the mannequin.

Sue looked back over her shoulder and shook her head. “It’s too small,” she explained. Sue usually wore a size fourteen, depending on the cut of the garment; the dress on the mannequin was no more than a four.

Snape frowned. “Come here and turn around,” he commanded.

Bemused, Sue walked back. “Like this?” she said, turning in a circle with her arms stretched out to either side, letting the hangers dangle from each hand.

Snape eyed her from head to toe with a piercing expression, making her spine tingle. Then he gave a sharp nod. He looked around carefully, then with a flick of his wrist produced his wand. Sue nearly gasped, rising up on her tiptoes to see better as he pointed the dark length of wood surreptitiously at the mannequin. Its dimensions rapidly altered, along with the dress it bore, until Sue could see that the mannequin’s torso was shaped exactly like hers; with a final shift of fabric, the dress shaped itself to the torso like a glove.

Sue didn’t know what to say. “Wow, her mouth supplied of its own accord. “That was…very cool.”

Snape inclined his head graciously and stepped back from the mannequin, gesturing her forward. “A simple bit of Transfiguration, nothing more.”

“Still,” she said, fingering the cloth. “Thank you. Thank you very much. It looks perfect.”

Was it her imagination, or did he look almost—pleased?

Sue decided not to read too much into his motives. He was probably just trying to butter her up so she would tell him whatever he wanted to know later. She had felt his intense attention fixed on her when she revealed her knowledge of Grimmauld Place, and did not think for a moment that he had forgotten it.

The shopkeeper did not re-emerge from the back room until they rang the bell at the register; when she rang up the blue bunny dress, she frowned at it, but folded it up with a shrug and placed it in the bag with the rest of the clothes without comment.

_______________________________________________________________

At a chemist shop down the street, the girl selected toiletries at an impressively rapid speed. Perhaps she was conscious of Severus’s rising impatience with the errand. To be fair, she had been remarkably quick about selecting a wardrobe; he had been envisioning escorting her to several shops while she dithered over this piece of clothing or that one, a whole day wasted, but the morning was only a little over half gone and they were nearly finished.

“I think that’s all,” the girl said, looking down into the basket on her arm thoughtfully. Severus glanced in and saw only the basics: a toothbrush, toothpaste, some floss, soap, shampoo, a conditioner that promised to tame unruly curls (Severus knew better, but supposed there was no harm in a little wishful thinking), deodorant, a package of women’s undergarments (the one clothing item the girl had wisely decided not to buy secondhand), and a comb.

He felt his eyebrow rise in surprise. “Really?” he asked before he could stop himself.

“Why, did you think of something I’ve missed?” she asked absently, stirring through the items as if to check they were all still there.

“Not exactly. I merely expected you would require more. Don’t most females use a great number of beauty and hygiene products and the like?”

The girl looked at him in surprise, then laughed. He nearly scowled, but it was clear from a glance that she was genuinely amused, not laughing at his expense.

“I guess some ‘females’ do. Some ‘males’ too. I’ve never been much into wearing makeup and my hair laughs in the face of all products, so this is all that I usually use. I’m assuming Sirius will have towels and toilet paper. Hopefully,” she added with a frown.

Severus did not miss the name; it sent a hot stab of hate through him, as hearing it always did.

“ _What did you just say?_ ” he hissed. First she had revealed that she knew where they were going; now she knew who would be there also? What else did she know, and in Merlin’s name, _how?_ He did not think for a moment Dumbledore had told her, though it was the only logical source of information she could possibly have, _if_ her story about how she had gotten here was true.

And that was the sixty-four thousand dollar question, wasn’t it?

The girl paled. “I can explain,” she said. “Well, I can try to explain, anyway. You’re going to think I’m a liar.”

“I am very accomplished at knowing when teenagers are lying and when they are not,” he said coldly. To his surprise, she snorted.

“ _Teenagers?_ Just how old do you think I am?” she asked.

He glared down his nose at her, an expression that almost always cowed his students (and not a few of his peers and elders as well). “You can’t be more than a month past nineteen,” he declared with a sneer.

She sighed. “It’s my height, isn’t it. You know, I had a department store clerk ask me where my mommy was once at Macy’s. I was twenty-four at the time.”

Severus blinked. “At the time?”

She gave him a slow, wicked sort of grin. Suddenly, the shop seemed uncomfortably warm; he had to resist the urge to tug at his collar to loosen it.

“I’m twenty-nine. The big three-oh’s coming up in…well. I don’t know how to count it now. It’s hard to explain,” she said, frowning in confusion.

“That cannot be right,” he said flatly, but she was again allowing him prolonged eye contact, and he could see without needing to look too deeply that it was quite true. Her confusion about her next birthday, though, he could make no sense of. Before he could push deeper, the girl turned away to the counter. He had no choice but to follow; this was not the place to push for answers, not with so many Muggles on hand to overhear.

When they exited the shop however, Severus took her firmly by the wrist. “Before we go to Grimmauld Place, we will have that conversation that we could not have over tea,” he declared sternly.

“Okay,” she said, looking uneasy. “Do you know a place we can talk privately? It’s not something we’ll want overheard.”

“Obviously,” he sneered. She did not react, merely looked back at him patiently.

He led her down the street and around the corner, where he knew there was a small park. He steered her to a bench hidden in an out-of-the-way corner among a stand of ash trees. After he had confirmed there were no people, magical or Muggle, nearby and cast a few privacy spells, he turned and stood directly in front of the bench, looming over her where she sat.

“Tell me where you have gotten your information. I will know if you are lying,” he said in his softest, most dangerous tone.

Her cheeks were very pink, but she glared up at him. “Not with you hanging over me like that. Sit down, for Christ’s sake.”

Severus scowled, but after a slight hesitation, he sat down on the right edge of the bench, preserving a sizable gap between himself and the girl and crossing his legs with an irritated gesture.

“Better?” he sniped. The girl actually had the temerity to _roll her eyes_.

“Yes, thank you,” she replied primly, folding her hands over her skirt and crossing her ankles like a schoolgirl. He got the distinct impression that she was mocking him.

“Speak,” he commanded through gritted teeth.

“I thought we’d talked about this already,” the girl retorted, crossing her arms stubbornly. “I’m not a dog. I don’t ‘speak’ on command.”

His impulse was to jump up and try to intimidate her with his height again, but he restrained it. A display of temper or an attempt to force her would only make her more close-mouthed. Severus took a deep breath instead and forced his clenched jaw to relax.

“Forgive me for being rude. But this is extremely important. There is no time for games. Lives may be at stake,” he added in a softer tone.

The girl looked down at her lap unhappily, her stubborn expression vanishing.

“I know,” she murmured. “I know that.” She looked back up and laughed uneasily.

“I’m afraid,” she admitted, and Severus did not need to read her mind to know it was true. “I don’t know what’s happening, or why. I don’t know why I’m here, or even how. But I am, and there’s a war coming. Isn’t there?”

Severus nodded. He did not want to speak aloud for fear that she might stop speaking.

The girl sighed and pushed her pale, tangled hair back from her face nervously. “I don’t know how to begin. I guess I’ll start with last night and if I have to double back then I will.”

“I told you that I’m from Texas, and that’s true. But it’s not your Texas that I’m from. Your world’s, I mean. Your universe’s? The point is, if we tried to go to the Texas I live in from here, by any normal means—that’s Wizarding or Muggle—we wouldn’t be able to.”

Severus stared at her in absolute disbelief. “And what makes you think that is at all _possible,_ let alone probable?”

She laughed again. “Because of you, of course. You, and Dumbledore. Hogwarts, and wands, and magic? None of those things exist where I’m from. _You_ don’t exist where I come from,” she said, gesturing at him.

The girl had gone mad. Dumbledore must have gone mad too, if he believed this farcical tale.

“You don’t believe me,” the girl said flatly, her bronze eyes searching his. She sighed and rubbed a hand over her face tiredly. “Of course you don’t,” she muttered. “ _I_ don’t believe me, hardly.”

Abruptly, she scooted closer on the bench, making him start; he put both feet flat on the ground and nearly leaned away, but stopped himself.

“Look,” she said, tilting her face up and locking eyes with him, her mouth set in a determined line. “See for yourself. I’ll do my best to show you.”

Severus hesitated; it would be better, surer, if he used his wand, but it was too risky to bring it out in the open here, in the middle of a Muggle park. Instead, he slowly lifted his hands and settled them on her shoulders, giving her plenty of time to lean away. The contact would make it easier to penetrate her mind and glimpse her thoughts, and, he hoped, give him a little more control over what he saw.

The girl seemed surprised; her seemingly chronic blush stained her cheeks again, but she did not move away from him.

“I’ll show you the books,” she whispered, and then he was falling into her eyes.

_______________________________________________________________

           

Sue was suddenly no longer in the park, although she could still dimly feel the iron bench beneath her thighs and the dappled sunlight on her skin, like a memory.

It was her birthday. She had just turned twenty. She was unwrapping a present; a book. The name “Harry Potter” gleamed from the cover in jagged gold letters as she tore away the wrapping paper, over a boy flying a broom through an archway.

“What’s this?” she heard herself say. “Is it that book you were telling me about, Jake?”

“You’re gonna love it, Suzy,” a young man’s voice said, and an ocean of grief crashed down on Sue, washing the memory away.

Now she was somewhere else. She was lying on her bed at home, in the new house. She was weeping hard, harder than she ever had in her life. _They’re gone, all gone,_ she thought, and she sat up and threw the book in her hands across the room as hard as she could. It landed open and spine-up, pages crumpled like wings beneath it, and she could still read the title on the spine: _Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows._ Her chest felt like she had swallowed a hot stone—it was her grief, burning her from the inside out.

Now she was somewhere else again, but she could feel that she was not alone; she had brought Snape with her. Sue could smell pine in the air, sweet and sharp. She was trying to show him the truth, she remembered. Why had she brought him here? Sue looked around.

It was Christmas. One of the presents for her under the tree was the four-box set of the _Harry Potter_ books, Sue remembered, and suddenly it was in her lap, unwrapped, as she sat before the tree. The clear lights twinkled merrily, making their living room glow with a beautiful soft light. She picked up one of the books blindly, the thickest one, and turned it over in her hands. _Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire._

_Papi says only real trees are worth decorating, it’s not a Christmas tree if you can’t smell it,_ she heard Jake whisper in her ear, and she couldn’t bear it, she pulled away from the hands grasping her shoulders and slid off the bench, sobbing.

           

_______________________________________________________________

Severus sat baffled, blinking in the sunlight that shone on the bench. He had witnessed the Dark Lord using his abilities in Legilimency to torture many times, but never had anyone had such a reaction to _his_ application of the enchantment. He felt slightly sick at the thought, and pushed it aside roughly. He had only gone along where the girl had taken him; he hadn’t even had a chance to attempt to steer her before they were derailed by the backlash of her emotions. He could not be to blame.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” the girl gasped, swiping roughly at her eyes as she attempted to calm herself. Quickly, he conjured a handkerchief. The girl flinched away from him when he moved to offer it to her, so he hastily drew back. She pulled herself back up onto the bench slowly. Severus did not dare to assist her; his touch might hold unpleasant associations for her, after he’d used it to penetrate her mind.

“Thanks,” she murmured as she plucked the handkerchief out of his loose grip and wiped her eyes and face with it. His fingers tingled oddly where hers had carelessly brushed against them, and he clenched that hand into a fist.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to…I didn’t know that was going to happen,” she said dully, folding the handkerchief into a neat square and settling it on her knee with great care. Her hands were trembling, he noted with alarm.

“Are you all right?” he asked cautiously, then frowned. _Of course she is not all right,_ he berated himself internally. _If she was all right, she would not be filled with such pain._ She concealed it well, he had to admit; he would not have been aware of it at all had he not touched it directly by viewing her memories.

She gave him a brief, close-lipped smile. “I don’t know how to answer that. I’m not sure I even know what it means, anymore.”

Severus hesitated. He enjoyed provoking people to anger, he could not deny that; but contrary to what his students likely believed, he did not enjoy making people cry. There had been a time, once, when he had derived pleasure from the pain of others, but he had, thankfully, grown out of it. _Or perhaps I merely required a sharp lesson in the most difficult way possible to see the error of my ways,_ he thought, and suppressed a shudder.

“I apologize,” he managed, stiffly, “if I caused you distress.”

The girl shook her head quickly. “Not your fault.” She heaved a deep sigh.

“It might be easier if I tell you first, about me. How I know what I know will come up naturally that way, and it won’t be as…intense…as reliving the memories. Then later you can take a look for yourself to confirm I’m telling the truth.”

Part of Severus wanted to tell her that it could wait. But it could not. He had to know. He inclined his head in agreement, and waited.

“So. Right.” The girl took a deep breath.

“My full name is Miriam Susan Smith. I prefer Sue. I don’t know who my biological parents were, or what happened to them. I was raised by a man named Tim Martinez. My Papi. He took me into his family and made me belong.”

As she began, her tone was flat and wooden, but she began to warm a little to the task as she spoke of her family, Severus observed.

“It never mattered to me that I wasn’t related to my family and I didn’t know where I came from, because it never mattered to Papi, or to Jake. He was my brother,” she added, and then she paused to fiddle with the handkerchief again restlessly. Severus did not miss the way her throat worked, but he said nothing and waited for her to continue when she was ready.

“There was Jake, and Papi, and me. We didn’t need anybody else. _I_ didn’t need anybody else. I was happy.”

“What happened?” Severus prodded gently, when the silence had stretched on for more than a minute.

The girl swallowed and clasped her hands together in her lap, hard enough to turn her knuckles white. “They died. Last fall. It was a car accident. A man ran a red light and hit them, and they all died. Not…not all right away.” The girl stopped; her eyes were streaming again, and she was shaking, but her hoarse voice was almost preternaturally calm.

“Jake had a little girl. Her mom wasn’t ready to be a mother. So Jake kept her. He named her Susanna, but he called her Suzy. Like he called me, since we were little together. She was only two. The first time he let me hold her, I knew I’d love her for the rest of my life.

“She was in the hospital for three days, after the accident. I stayed with her every day, for as long as the nurses would let me. At the end, when they…when they knew she was…I just stayed by her and held her hand. She never woke up.”

The girl was hunched over now, her voice hardly more than a whisper. Severus’s hand reached out of its own accord, but merely hovered between them; he could not decide if he should comfort her, was not sure how he would even begin if he tried. She took his hand gently out of the air and clasped it gently. Her fingers were cold.

“I didn’t know what to do, after. I felt like…like I had died too. Only I was still walking around, still breathing, somehow. And I didn’t have my brother or my Papi to ask for help anymore. I was lost.

“Papi left everything to me and Jake, and with Jake gone too, the house and Papi’s life insurance all went to me. I sold our house. I couldn’t stand being there; it felt like any minute Jake would walk through the door laughing, or Suzy would come out of her room with a book for me to read for her, or Papi would stick his head out of the kitchen and ask me if I was hungry. I just wanted to forget.

“I used the money to buy a new house across the state, and I lived off of it until I found a job. And I just kept going, waiting for it to get easier. But it hasn’t yet.”

She looked up at him with a bitter smile. “I told you it would get around to what you wanted to know. Sorry it’s taking so long. Jake is the one who gave me the books, you see. We used to read them together, and talk about them while we waited for the next one to come out. He died before they finished, but I kept reading because that’s what he would have wanted me to do.” The girl let out a shaky breath. “And because while I was lost in a book, especially those books, it was the only time I still felt alive. It was the only way I could really forget, even for just a little while.”

Severus’s hand felt strange, cradled in her gentle, icy hand. He remembered what he had seen through her eyes: the books with their impossible titles, the bright cartoon illustrations that showed things no one had any business knowing, nor reading about.

“I don’t understand,” he whispered, but he felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise regardless.

“Don’t you?” she asked, almost sadly. She looked him directly in the eye.

“Listen. It sounds impossible, but this is the truth. I was born in 1978. In the year 2000, my brother gave me a book for my birthday, a children’s book, called _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone_. Or _Philosopher’s Stone,_ if you aren’t in America. There were six more books, each one about one year Harry Potter spent at Hogwarts, School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Jake bought me all but the last; that one I had to buy for myself. That was this year. It’s 2007 where I come from. And where I come from, anybody who’s read Harry Potter knows about Hogwarts, Grimmauld Place, the Order, Sirius Black. Even Professor Severus Snape, Potions master and head of Slytherin House.”

Severus snatched his hand away. Black rage bubbled up like bile in the back of his throat.

“Very clever. You almost had me,” he said coldly, standing up and straightening his jacket with a vicious yank. “I wonder, are you a skilled actress, or just a madwoman who actually believes this—absurd, utter _tripe,_ ” he hissed at her viciously. The girl flinched, but she didn’t look away.

“I told you, you wouldn’t believe it, didn’t I? And no one’s asking you to take my word for it. Go on,” she challenged, her expression somehow defiant and profoundly sad at the same time. “Go on and look. I want you to see. It’s the only way you’ll listen.”

Severus hesitated, then, with an irritated snarl, he grabbed hold of the girl’s chin, none too gently, and reached out with his mind into hers once more. This time, there was no distraction. Image after image flashed before his mind’s eye, almost too fast to take in. Book covers with Potter’s name splashed across them in gaudy foil print. Film posters, one with a grim-faced man that he recognized with a jolt as an actor playing himself. Words on a page, with names he knew: names of Death Eaters, names of Order members. His own name. Snippets of dialogue—words taken right out of his mouth.

Severus jerked away, breathing hard. “It is a trick,” he said, but he felt cold inside. The girl had no magic, that was plain, and no Muggle could withstand a Legilimens of his ability, much less create false memories that vivid and detailed. Perhaps a Legilimens with skill rivalling the Dark Lord’s had modified the girl’s memories to the point that she believed what she was telling him to be the truth? But that, too, would leave a trace, and he had sensed no magical interference. Her memories appeared to be completely genuine, and untouched.

“It’s not a trick,” she said quietly. Her eyes were dry now, but her face was chalky-pale. “Tell me what I need to do to prove I’m telling the truth, and I’ll do it. I need you to believe me.”

“Why? What does it matter what I believe? You obviously have convinced Dumbledore, and his credulity is worth far more than mine,” Severus snarled, his hands clenching into fists.

“Because I know what’s going to happen! And I need you to listen, so that maybe, together, we can change it! People will die, unless I can stop it, and I can’t without your help!” she cried, jumping to her feet. She seized his arm above the elbow and he tried to shake her off with a snarl, but she held on, cold fingers digging in sharply.

“You know Dumbledore can’t be trusted, not completely,” she hissed at him, and Severus, stunned, stopped trying to shake her off. “Remember that night, on the hill in the storm? You came to ask him to save Lily Evans, and he asked you what you would do in return. He told you that you disgusted him, but he used you anyway. He’s still using you. He’d use anyone, in any way he needed to, if he thought it was necessary for the greater good. _You know that_.” She shook his arm for emphasis, and then she let go, her face flushed a fiery red.

“If I tell him everything I know, I don’t know what he’ll do with it,” she continued in a quieter tone, looking away. “I’m afraid it will just make things worse.”

“And you presume to think that you know what _I_ will do?” Severus whispered. The girl shivered slightly in response, but she didn’t shrink away from him.

“No. I don’t know you. I know some things about you, but I don’t know you well enough to say whether I should trust you, if you’re a good person or a bad one. I don’t know for sure.” Her hand curled tentatively around his arm again. To his surprise, he didn’t pull away.

“But ever since I first read about you, I’ve believed in you. Even when I thought you weren’t real, I believed in you. I still do. I already trust you. Please. Will you help me?”

Her eyes stared up at his, huge and beseeching and terrible in their hope. He looked away.

“It’s time to get you to Grimmauld Place,” was all Severus could say in reply.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit: I added a bit to this chapter because the next chapter is getting pretty long and the beginning really was a better fit for this chapter. Will be posting Chapter 5 soon; I just need to refresh my memory on the floorplan/details of Grimmauld Place from canon. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	5. Grimmauld Place

 

  _And he says "Reach for the girl,_  
_reach for the girl and hold her close._  
_Believe you can shine when you're silver,_  
_and I promise you gold. I promise you gold._  
_And whenever you're dark inside,_  
_don't let go. No, don't let go._  
_Remember there's rain and there's candy and Christmasy winter snow._  
_And remember I love you the same and I'll strangle your pain."_  
  
_And he tells me to sing, and I sing,_  
_and I sing for my brother who keeps me sane_  
_and tells me everything will be okay._

\- Blue October, _For My Brother_

 

Sue followed Snape morosely as they walked in awkward silence. The day had become cloudy; she thought it would probably rain that afternoon. Hadn’t she read somewhere that it rained about two to three times as often in London as it did in the whole state of Texas?

Sue sighed. She didn’t mind rain, but she hated getting wet. And she hated crying in front of people too, come to think of it.

It had been horribly embarrassing, going to pieces in front of Snape like that. Not that she’d behaved in a very cool or collected way before that, she reflected with a grimace. Just being around the man had her all wrong-footed and discombobulated in a way Sue had never before experienced. She had been aware that she had some rather intense feelings about him; she just hadn’t realized being around him, talking to him, would be so…so…

Difficult. And humiliating, and uncomfortable, and…absolutely distracting.

It wasn’t just the weather and Sue’s spirits that had taken a turn for the worse; the streets Snape was leading her down seemed to be steadily more and more shabby, lined with peeling-paint houses and scruffy, undergrown trees. Sue walked a little faster, to keep closer to Snape’s back. It was daylight, but this seemed to be a rather seedy part of London.

Severus came to a halt at a small plaza of shabby townhouse-style buildings, arranged around a patchy, unkempt square of grass. There was a good deal of litter and even whole bags of abandoned trash about, and several of the buildings had broken windows. The whole area had a distinct air of abandonment, save for one building, the tallest and largest of the group. Its exterior was as shabby and grimy as the other buildings, but there was no rubbish piled around its stoop like the others. Looking to either side, Sue saw with surprise that the building stood between numbers eleven and thirteen.

“It’s not hidden yet?”

“What is not hidden?” Snape replied absently, absorbed with unfolding the piece of parchment paper he had just taken out of his pocket.

“Number Twelve. I didn’t think I’d be able to see it.”

Snape stiffened and rounded almost angrily on her. He glared across the street, then at the parchment, once more at the house, and then at her. “You should not be able to. Describe to me what you see.”

“I just said, I see Number Twelve,” she protested, but when he glared at her, she relented. “It’s bigger and taller than the other buildings, but still grimy. The paint’s peeling. The door is black, and—” she squinted, “—there’s a silver door knocker. Looks like a snake. Good enough?”

Snape’s expression was thunderous; he seized her by the elbow and dragged her across the street, right up to the short wrought-iron fence that separated the house from the street.

“Walk over the threshold and onto the steps, but do not touch the door,” he commanded, releasing her arm and opening the gate. Sue glared at him and rubbed her arm pointedly, but she did as she was bid.

“And? Now what?” she asked him from the middle step of the worn stone stoop.

“You still see the building?” he asked doubtfully, crossing his arms and staring up at her from the sidewalk, his dark eyes narrowed.

Sue rolled her eyes. “ _Yes._ Here, look.”

“Don’t—!” he hissed, but it was too late; she rapped her left knuckles on the door without turning around. To her surprise, there came a series of clicks and snicks, like the sound of keys turning in many locks all at once, then a rattle like a chain being drawn back. With a loud creak, the door opened all by itself, just a crack.

Sue stared at Snape; he looked as shocked as she felt. “Now I _know_ I shouldn’t have been able to do _that_ ,” she said, and with a scowl Snape pushed through the little gate and joined her on the steps.

“Come in behind me. Do not touch anything, and keep your voice down,” he warned. Sue nodded, swallowing the apprehension rising in her throat with a gulp.

The hall within was very dim; Sue blinked her eyes, trying to adjust to the gloom as she shut the door behind her. After the daylight, it was too dark for her to even see Snape’s back in front of her, though she was standing close enough behind him that she could still sense the warmth of his body. The air was dank and musty; Sue smelled dust and mildew and something else, sickly-sweet and foul, underneath. She held back the urge to sneeze.

“Who’s there?” a harsh voice rasped, making her jump and reach out blindly to clutch at the back of Snape’s jacket.

“It is I,” Snape called softly. “Put your wand away, Black. I have brought the guest Dumbledore spoke to you of, here with me.”

A dim light suddenly appeared ahead, increasing to a soft glow that lit the hall. Peering around Snape’s arm, Sue saw a tall, gaunt man with long, rather unkempt black hair, holding his lit wand aloft. Behind him she could see a grand staircase made from a dark, rich wood, its steps coated in dust.

“Most people knock before entering someone else’s house,” the man whispered accusingly, not lowering his wand.

“If you had locked it properly, I might have had that opportunity,” Snape sneered back, his voice taking on an oily, unpleasant tone of dislike. “As it was, my charge here only had to touch it to open it. Perhaps we should have another discussion with Dumbledore about security, and practicing proper caution?”

“What are you talking about?” the man, who could only be Sirius Black, hissed back. “It _was_ locked. The only way you could have opened it was with your wand. Never mind it,” he interrupted shortly, when Snape seemed inclined to argue further. “I’ll make sure it gets locked properly behind you, don’t worry.”

“See that you do, Black.” Snape said coldly, and put away his wand. Sirius did not lower his in response.

“What’s the pass phrase, then?” he said shortly, squinting suspiciously at Snape. His eyes flicked to Sue, still half hidden behind Snape. Sue smiled and gave Sirius a little wave, but kept silent.

“The significant owl hoots in the night,” replied Snape, through gritted teeth.

“A wet duck only flies at midnight,” Sirius replied, grinning. Sue smothered a laugh with great difficulty. He lowered his wand and gave a lazy wave at the walls; with a hiss, the gas lamps lining the hall lit, dispelling the gloom with a flickering, yellow light. Sue could see that the hall they stood in had once been very grand; now, the wallpaper hung in strips and tatters, and each gas lamp was wreathed in cobwebs. Sue craned her head to look up at the ceiling, where a huge, tarnished brass chandelier hung. It too was festooned with a generous garland of cobwebs, and—yes, the arms were wrought in the shape of serpents, each mouth stretched wide to hold a candle, though all were currently empty.

“Just got those fixed,” Sirius said, gesturing at the gas lamps as he approached. “Now we won’t be stumbling about in the dark trying to make this place habitable, at least.”

Snape ignored him. “I must go,” he said shortly, turning to Sue. “I will return tomorrow to continue our…discussion.” With that, he slipped past her and left, closing the door quietly but firmly behind him.

“Rude bugger,” Sirius muttered under his breath as he tapped his wand to the locks and bolts Sue could now see on this side of the door, re-locking them. Sue counted at least ten before he turned back to her with a bracing smile.

“Well, since Snape couldn’t be bothered to make any introductions…” Sirius stuck his wand in the back pocket of his trousers and offered his hand. “My name’s Sirius Black. Welcome to the noble and most moldy house of my stately, dotty ancestors.”

Sue chuckled. “I’m Sue. Sue Smith. Nice to meet you,” she replied, mimicking his hushed tone as she shook his hand.

“Sorry we’re having to whisper,” he said, gesturing for her to follow him down the hall. Under their feet, the threadbare carpet released large puffs of dust with each step. He pointed with his head at a pair of long, dusty and moth-eaten drapes on the left wall as they passed them. “Don’t want to wake her up.”

Sue nodded. “Snape warned me. Your mother, right?” She felt a bit guilty insinuating that Snape had told her that, but after the emotionally draining ordeal that trying to explain her position to Snape had proved to be, she didn’t feel up to alluding to it with anyone else just then.

“Nasty old bat. She goes spare whenever she sees me, and if she saw you here there’d be hell to pay. Not very keen on Muggles, my dearly departed family members. Anyway, here, let me take those for you,” he said, reaching for the bags she carried. Sue allowed him to take them, although they weren’t heavy.

“I’m going to figure out a way to get her off the wall if it kills me,” Sirius muttered as he led Sue up the stairs. Sue grimaced as they passed the row of severed house-elf heads mounted on the wall. _Fucking gruesome,_ she thought, and resolved to talk to Kreacher later.

“I’ve set up a room for you on the fourth floor, near mine,” Sirius was saying. “You should probably stay there if you aren’t with me or another wizard; the house isn’t exactly safe to wander about in, even if you have a wand to defend yourself. This place has been closed up for about a decade, so there’s all kinds of magical vermin rattling about, plus all the Dark things and hexed objects and what-not my parents left behind.

“It’s going to take a long time to make this place livable again.” He sighed morosely, and Sue made a sympathetic noise.

“Let me know if I can do anything to help,” she said, speaking in a normal tone now that they had reached the second floor landing. _No, this is the first floor, since we’re in Britain_ , she reminded herself. “I’d like to earn my keep if I can.”

“Thanks, but some others are coming this evening to stay and help clean. You’ll like them; they’re a nice family, the Weasleys.”

Sue stumbled over a step in her surprise. “The Weasleys are coming tonight?”

Sirius gave her a curious glance. “You know them?”

Well…yes and no,” she hedged. “Can I ask you a strange question?”

“If you don’t mind a strange answer,” he replied, grinning. The effect it had on his face was nearly magical; it made him look a decade younger, banishing the weary lines and disguising the thinness of his hollowed cheeks.

“What exactly do you know about me? I mean, what did Dumbledore tell you?”

Sirius shrugged. “Not much. He usually keeps his cards close to the vest, so that’s not too strange, though. He said you’re a Muggle, and that you’re in danger and in need of a safe place to stay, where Dark wizards wouldn’t be able to track you down. This place might not be the safest on the inside, but it’s impossible to find. My grandfather made it Unplottable and Dumbledore performed the Fidelius Charm just last week, so anybody that Dumbledore doesn’t trust won’t be able to find you, not even if they were standing right out in the lane.”

“That’s good,” Sue said slowly. She hadn’t thought too much about the danger she might be in herself; she had been too preoccupied with the people who belonged here who would be in danger, including the man she was currently following upstairs. Her head was too full now; she filed it away to consider later.

“I just figured you must have some Wizarding relatives that you might be used against if Voldemort wants to put pressure on them, something like that,” Sirius continued as they rounded the last landing. “Is that right?”

“Something like that,” Sue agreed. She was grateful to Dumbledore for not giving out too many details. The fewer people she had to explain herself to, the better, as far as she was concerned.

At the top of the stairs, they came out into a short hall. A pair of gas lamps like the ones below guttered on the wall, augmenting the weak sunlight that managed to filter in through the grimy oval window that she recognized from the townhouse’s façade. Sue had caught a glimpse of the other floors as they passed, and this one seemed much smaller. Only two doors led off of the landing. The farthest one faced them and bore a very tarnished nameplate. Sue could make out an “S” if she squinted. The closer door had a square of parchment stuck upon it like a sign, but the small hand-lettering was too hard to read in the dim light.

_Still, I suppose I know what it says,_ she thought.

“That there is my room,” Sirius said, gesturing to the farther door. “Here’s where you’ll be,” he said as he opened the closer door on their left.

Sue stepped through into a quite large, slightly musty room, decorated all in green and silver. There was a huge four-poster bed with a deep emerald canopy and curtains on the left side of the room from the door, not quite in the far corner; with the curtains pulled back, she could see the Black family crest and motto painted over the carved headboard; _Toujours Pur._ Yellowed newspaper clippings decorated the wall between the headboard and the crest.

On the right there was a fireplace, unlit and flanked by a pair of moth-eaten green armchairs with a pattern of fleur-de-lis embroidered in silver thread. Directly across from the door were a triad of tall windows, flanked by long, dusty green velvet curtains, and a plush window seat in a matching shade of dark green. In the far right corner stood an enormous wardrobe made of dark wood.

The walls, papered with what appeared to be real silk, were draped with tapestries that echoed the greens and silvers of the rest of the room, and the bed was flanked by dark wooden bookshelves that came up to about her elbow. To top the whole thing off, a smaller version of the chandelier from the entrance hall dangled over the center of the room, complete with tarnished brass snakes.

It was very Victorian-era opulent, and very Slytherin. Sue loved it immediately.

“This was my brother’s room,” Sirius said, leaning against the doorframe and watching as Sue turned slowly on the faded carpet, taking it all in.

“Thank you for allowing me to stay here,” she said quietly, as he came in and set her bags down by the wardrobe.

“It’s no trouble. Sorry it’s still a bit dusty. I cleaned up as well as I could, but I’m not so great at household magic. And I couldn’t do much about the décor,” he said, his nose wrinkling in distaste. Sue held back a laugh.

“It’s perfect.”

“Would you like a cup of tea? Something to eat? I was just thinking of making some lunch when you arrived.”

Sue’s smile faltered. “Actually, I…I think I’d rather rest, actually. It’s been a long morning.”

“Say no more,” said Sirius lightly, going for the door. “I know how much I’d enjoy a morning with old Snape. If you do need anything, just give me a shout from the staircase. But stay on the stairs,” he warned. “You don’t want to get bit by a doxy or pelted by one of my grandfather’s hexed clocks. Or maybe worse.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t go wandering,” Sue promised reassuringly. Sirius gave her a smile and a nod, shutting the door quietly behind him as he left.

Alone, Sue dropped onto the bed with a sigh. The windows, large as they were, didn’t let in a great amount of light through the grime caked on them. Even with the curtains open wide, it was still gloomy.

_Or maybe I’m the gloomy one_ , she thought, and flopped onto her back on the bedspread. Staring at the chandelier overhead, Sue allowed the morning to replay in her head. When she got to the part in the park, Sue curled up on the bed in a ball. Her throat ached.

She had not thought about her family deliberately in a long while. Part of her felt ashamed. But a larger part of her still shied away from the pain of remembering what she had lost. Now, she thought that the time had come where she must deal with it, if only because she desperately needed to be able to think clearly, in these strange new circumstances. She no longer had the luxury of burying her head in the sand and hiding from her grief.

Most people would not describe Sue Smith as a terribly emotional person. Her usual manner was one of calm detachment. Many people had thought her cold; growing up, she had had few friends.

Except for Jake, of course. Jake had understood her true nature. He had been her best friend, as well as her brother. Perhaps her only real friend; most of the companions of her childhood and adolescence had really been Jake’s friends, and had tolerated her with good humor for his sake.

Sue had always been odd. She found it hard to interact with others sometimes. The things they wanted to talk about did not hold her interest, nor did they themselves have any interest in the things she found fascinating. Her natural impulse was to stand apart from a group and observe, not to try to be a part of it. She often took people literally when they did not mean to be taken so, and her tendency to respond with logic rather than an emotional reaction at times both bewildered and angered her peers. Especially as a child, she had often been blunt to the point of rudeness.

But she did feel. She felt very deeply, even if she did not always react accordingly. Her love for her family was as solid and concrete a fact as the temperature of boiling water or the infinite decimal points of pi.

Which was exactly why it was so painful, she supposed. Not only had she lost the people she loved most in all the world, maybe even the only people she truly cared about personally—she had also lost the only people in the world who had really understood her, and loved her in return.

Sue had always enjoyed being alone. Until her family had died, however, she had never understood what it meant to be lonely.

She didn’t care for it.

In times of emotional upheaval, Sue liked to think of the universe. It was so, so large, and she was so, so small in comparison. It usually helped her to put her problems in perspective and gave her the distance she needed to embrace her feelings and then put them aside so she could think clearly.

When her grief for her family had still been fresh, Sue had not been able to bear the idea of embracing it. To accept her grief and put it aside felt too much like accepting their deaths and putting them aside, and she hadn’t been ready to face that.

But now she also knew she could not go on pretending none of it had ever happened and never thinking of them, either. Not only was it impractical, it was an insult to their memory. They would not have wanted her to suffer, but they also would not have wanted her to forget.

They would have wanted her to move on with her life. It was time to start.

So Sue closed her eyes and thought of the universe. She let great glowing nebulae and the glitter of a million billion stars revolve in her head for a long time.

And then she thought of her Papi, and her brother, and his tiny little girl who had barely gotten to be a part of the universe at all. How much she missed them. How alone and cold she felt without them. The light of their warm love that she had basked within her whole life, without fully appreciating its value, was gone now, forever. She would not feel it again.

Sue wept for a while, and after she was done, she felt a bit better. Then she slept.

________________________________________________________________

 

Severus stood with his head bowed in the shower in his quarters, allowing the steaming water to strike the back of his head and neck, flowing over him. He could not stop thinking about what he had seen in the girl’s mind. How could this be true? How could she have read a book—a _children’s story_ , for Merlin’s sake—that told about his life? It was ridiculous.

Completely absurd. Yet there it was, clear in her mind, irrefutable. A Muggle had no hope of preventing him from seeing the truth in their mind, which meant that her memories had to be real, and accurate.

_Unless someone planted them,_ he thought, but then reluctantly dismissed it. He knew how to detect even the most subtle modifications of a memory, and the girl’s had all the appearance of authenticity.

But if they were not fabricated…

And the girl knew things, things that were secret, things that she could not possibly know. Things she claimed to have learned from a set of fantasy novels.

Who had written these books? Where did their knowledge come from? Perhaps he was being spied on with magic somehow? Was this…person…watching him, even now?

He scowled and flushed at the idea, torn between the irrational impulse to cover himself and a perverse instinct to defiantly keep on washing. The latter impulse won out. If there was some unknown voyeur out there peeking at him in the bath and taking notes that she passed off as literature, let her be ashamed, not him.

But if he believed that the author of these books the girl had claimed to have read was watching him and knew his true allegiance, even his true motivations, then he had to ask: who could it possibly be? Anyone on the side of Dumbledore and the Order wouldn’t reveal what they saw because it proved that he truly was on their side after all, and anyone on the Dark Lord’s side would have revealed it directly to him, not written a Muggle book about it.

_None of it makes any bloody sense_ , he fumed to himself, scrubbing shampoo furiously into his scalp and rinsing it out.

But he was clever enough to know that he was mostly angry because the idea frightened him. If she knew some secrets, she might know more. Exactly how many secrets of his did she possess?

Severus shivered despite the hot water.

_I must find out what she knows. And I must keep her from revealing it._

Severus groaned aloud. Dumbledore was right; he would need to befriend her, although the headmaster likely had had a different motive in mind when he’d said it. Befriending people was definitely not his strong suit, but it was the only way to both find out what she might know and convince her not to blab to anyone else.

At least she was likely to be receptive, he mused as he shut off the water and began wringing the excess from his hair. _The girl obviously finds me attractive._

To his surprise, his cock twitched. _No. Absolutely not. That is a complication I definitely do not require nor desire in my life. Especially now._

But his cock seemed to have other ideas. Unbidden, a memory of the way the girl had clung to him that morning surfaced in his mind; suddenly he was well on his way to fully erect.

Well, he was already in the shower. He supposed it would do no harm to indulge a little.

Severus reached down and took himself firmly in hand, so to speak. He was surprised again at how fast and hard his orgasm came upon him; a few brisk strokes and it was over. Perhaps he should be doing this more often. Clearly he had a considerable amount of tension to release.

As Severus rinsed away the mess with a grimace, he resolved firmly to himself that it meant nothing that he had had a brief flash of the girl’s face, all wide bright eyes and flushed cheeks, in his mind at the moment of climax.

Yes. Definitely meaningless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I said regular updates, but I struggled with this chapter. I'm still not satisfied with it, but whatever. Not perfect, but finished.  
> I will try to update soon, but the holidays are fast approaching. We shall see.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	6. Kreacher’s Task

 

_I wish I drank tequila_   
_I wish I stayed up late_   
_But lately when the Sandman comes_   
_You know I just can't wait_   
_No, lately I can't wait._

_..._

_And I guess I'm still pretty angry_   
_And I don't want to be_   
_I don't know which was the bigger waste of time_   
_Missing you or wishing, instead, it was me._

\- Blues Traveler, _Pretty Angry_

 

       

When Sue awoke, it was dark outside. Her head ached slightly, and she felt all fuzzy and disoriented. For a moment, she did not know where she was—the near-total darkness of the room did not help—but as she sat up and rubbed the sleep from her eyes, her memory came back to her.

‘ _And sleep is halcyon time when griefs are still,’_ she thought to herself, and sighed heavily. Sue wondered how long she might be allowed to sit in the dark and never think or move again, before they eventually sent someone to drag her back out. It was not a very practical idea, she knew, but it was a tempting one nonetheless.

She was just thinking of going down the stairs and seeing if she could find Sirius so he could direct her to a bathroom, when she heard a noise. Her breath stopped; she listened hard—yes, there it was again.

There was something in the room with her.

Sue groped blindly about for something she might use as a weapon, but all her fingers found was a pillow. “Who’s there?” she said loudly, trying to sound unconcerned.

“The mud woman is speaking to Kreacher,” a low, hoarse voice muttered in response. “Blood-traitors and Mudbloods and muddy Muggles all coming to stay in my Mistress’s house, oh the shame...”

Sue breathed again. “Hello, Kreacher.”

There was a small popping sound, and suddenly the remaining candles in the chandelier overhead lit themselves. Now Sue could see the house-elf that had crept into her room while she slept. He stood half as tall as she, slightly hunched, beneath the chandelier, wearing nothing but a filthy rag hanging from his hips like a loincloth. Dirty white hair sprouted from the large pointy ears on either side of his otherwise bald head. The glare he fixed her with might have been funny, if it wasn’t so hateful.

“Master comes back from Azkaban, the murdering blood-traitor who broke my Mistress’s heart, and now he has put up a mud woman in Master Regulus’s room, scum not fit to lick Master Regulus’s boots, let alone sleep in his bed! Oh, what would my Mistress say?”

Sue bit the inside of her cheek hard to keep herself from smiling. “I’m very sorry, Kreacher. I needed a place to stay. And we both know poor Regulus is never coming home to sleep in this bed again. Don’t we?”

Kreacher froze in the act of wringing his hands, the scowl dropping off into a slack-jawed expression of shock.

“What is you saying about Master Regulus?” he hissed, seeming to swell with rage.

“He died a hero. You know that, you were there. Weren’t you?”

Kreacher slumped, his wrinkled little face the very picture of grief. Sue felt her heart clench in sympathy.

“It’s so awful, isn’t it?” she continued softly. “When the people you love leave you behind. Nothing’s ever the same.”

Kreacher turned abruptly away. “Master Regulus,” he moaned. “What is this muddy Muggle woman saying about you? What is she knowing about you going away?”

“I know he came to you for help, and you did the best you could.”

The elf seized his ear hair and tugged it hard; Sue winced.

“Wasn’t good enough! Kreacher did not obey! He tried! He tried, but he could not!”

"I know Kreacher, I know. It’s alright. Regulus didn’t know that he was giving you an impossible task. But I can help you.”

Kreacher whirled back around, his hands clenched in fists. “You is not knowing anything,” he spat. “You is being nothing but a dirty Muggle. How is you thinking you could help Kreacher?”

“I may be only a Muggle, but you’d be surprised what I know. That’s why I’m here. I know what happened to Regulus. I know that he took you with him, and made you promise not to tell. And his poor mother went mad with grief, and you couldn’t tell her.”

“How is you knowing this?” Kreacher whispered, swinging wildly again from rage to grief.

“I can’t explain. But let me tell you. You loved Regulus very much, didn’t you?

Kreacher nodded dumbly.

“And he cared about you too. But one day, Regulus’s own master told him that he needed an elf. So Regulus sent you to the Dark Lord.”

“It was a great honor,” Kreacher croaked. But he trembled.

“No,” Sue said sadly. “No, it wasn’t. It was terrible. But Regulus had told you to return when it was done. So you did.”

“The house-elf’s highest law is his Master’s bidding,” Kreacher whispered. “But when I returned, Master Regulus was afraid. He told me to stay hidden and not to leave the house.”

“The Dark Lord didn’t tell Regulus what he needed you for. But he told him that you were dead, I’m sure. And that it was a necessary sacrifice for his plans. So, Regulus knew that if the Dark Lord discovered that you had returned alive after all, there would be hell to pay. Probably for your whole family.”

“Master Regulus was afraid of the Dark Lord. So was I,” Kreacher said, hesitantly coming closer.

“Yes. He was terrible, wasn’t he? Terrible, and cruel.”

Kreacher shuddered again.

“And then some time later, Regulus asked you to take him to the place where the Dark Lord had abandoned you to die.”

Kreacher covered his face with his hands and let out a wail.

“Oh, Kreacher. I’m so sorry. Your Master Regulus was a good person. He tried to protect you. He no longer believed in the Dark Lord, but he knew that if anyone found out, or if anyone discovered what he had done, the Dark Lord would kill you all. So he stayed, and sent you back with the locket and ordered you to destroy it.”

“He ordered Kreacher,” the elf sobbed. “He ordered—Kreacher to leave—without him. And he told Kreacher—to go home—and never to tell my Mistress—what he had done—but to destroy—the Dark Lord’s locket. And he drank—all the potion—and Kreacher swapped the lockets—and watched…as Master Regulus…was dragged beneath the water…and…”

Kreacher fell upon the floor, wailing. Sue wanted to go to him, but did not; she knew he would not welcome it.

“You didn’t fail, Kreacher. You’ve kept the locket safe, haven’t you?”

“Kreacher could not destroy the locket. Kreacher tried everything, everything he knew, but nothing would work…So many powerful spells upon the casing, Kreacher was sure the way to destroy it was to get inside it, but it would not open…and Kreacher could not ask for help, he was too afraid…and my poor Mistress! Kreacher could not tell her what had happened to poor Master Regulus!”

“You were right Kreacher. You do need to open it to destroy it. But there is only one magic that can open that locket, and house-elves don’t have it. Regulus could not have known that the locket could not be destroyed except by someone with the gift required to open it. If he had, he would never have ordered you to do something that wasn’t in your power. But I know someone who does have that power.”

Kreacher sat up, his chest hitching, and wiped at the mess of tears and snot on his face with his loincloth. Sue quickly looked away—she was definitely not curious about house-elf anatomy.

“You is—you is knowing a way to destroy the locket?” he asked, hesitantly.

Sue smiled. “Yes. Yes I am. And I promise you, you can be there when it’s done.”

Kreacher looked at her as if he wanted to believe what he was hearing, but did not quite dare. “You is saying that you is going to help Kreacher carry out Master Regulus’s last order?”

“Yes,” Sue said again. “We have to make sure Regulus did not die in vain, don’t we? He gave his life to steal the Dark Lord’s locket. Do you know why?”

Kreacher shook his head.

“I think part of it was because of what the Dark Lord did to you. Regulus would never have given you to him if he’d known what he was going to do with you. Do you believe that?”

After a moment, Kreacher nodded, hesitantly. “Master Regulus…always liked Kreacher.”

“Just so. We may never know what else happened to make Regulus change his mind about the Dark Lord. But he must have known somehow that destroying that locket would weaken the Dark Lord. That’s why he had you bring him there, and ordered you to leave him. He died to defy the Dark Lord. But he wanted you and his family to stay safe, so he kept it secret. He wanted you to go on admiring the Dark Lord, because if you all changed your mind, it would put you in danger.”

 Kreacher absorbed this in silence. After a while, Sue asked gently, “Where is the locket now, Kreacher?”

“Kreacher is putting it in the drawing room with the other valuable magics for safe-keeping,” he croaked. “At first Kreacher tried wearing it, but it brought…bad thoughts.”

“I bet it did. That thing is an embodiment of pure evil. I think that you chose a good, safe place for it. I’ll need some time to talk to some friends of mine and get some things together before we can destroy it. I’ll let you know when everything is ready. Okay?”

Kreacher nodded, jerkily. After a moment, he muttered, “Thank you. Miss.”

Sue smiled. “Call me Sue. Just Sue. I told you I would help you, didn’t I? Now maybe you can help me? I need a bathroom rather desperately.”

Kreacher wiped his snout one more time and then gestured Sue over to a tapestry on the far wall, next to the unlit fireplace. Now that she was looking, she could make out the faint shape of a doorknob behind it, and she could see a few inches of the door between the edge of the tapestry and the carpet.

“Thank you very much, Kreacher.” The elf bowed, silently, then made as if to leave.

“One more thing, Kreacher? I think maybe Regulus wouldn’t have wanted you to call the people who are fighting the Dark Lord “Mudbloods” or “blood-traitors” or any of that. Since he was one of them, after all.”

Kreacher frowned. After a moment, he jerked his head in the approximation of a nod. Then he raised a hand, snapped his fingers, and disappeared with a loud pop.

After she used the facilities, Sue washed her hands and face, stopping to admire the black marble basin with its silver snake taps and faucet. She grimaced at her hair in the mirror and quickly fetched her comb from her bags, as well as some clothes.

Once she had changed out of her sleep-rumpled outfit from the day before and combed her hair into something approximating order, she felt a bit better; her nap had not left her very refreshed, though she suspected it would be enough to throw off her sleep cycle at any rate.

Since it couldn’t reasonably be put off any longer, Sue opened her door and stepped out onto the landing.

“Sirius?” she called. No response.

She had just started down the stairs when a horrendous screech echoed up from the ground floor.

“TRAITOR! SHAME OF MY FLESH! HOW DARE YOU BRING BLOOD-TRAITOR FILTH INTO MY HOME!”

Sue cringed. Unless she was very much mistaken, that must be the materfamilias of the Black family. There could be no doubt about whom she was speaking to, or whom she was talking about, for that matter. Sue forced her feet down the stairs.

“I told you to keep your voices down!” she heard a woman’s voice scold as she approached the first floor landing. The other portraits in the hall were adding their own voices to the resounding din; the noise was so awful, even from the stairs, it made her eyes water.

Peering down over the balcony, Sue saw a cluster of red-headed people standing in the hall, surrounded by several trunks and battered suitcases. She couldn’t see their faces, but one of them, a young girl with long, bright red locks, had her hands pressed over her ears to block out the screeching from the portrait on the wall. Its occupant had devolved from cursing into one long, blood-curdling shriek, seemingly without the need to pause for breath.

When Sue reached the bottom of the stairs, no one took any notice of her; Sirius was busy grimly tugging on the hangings surrounding the portrait, trying to close them over his mother’s face once more, with the assistance of a tall, balding man wearing glasses and dark wizard robes. Although he didn’t have much hair, what he had was the same shade of red as the other strangers in the hall. Meanwhile, the other adult in the room, a plump woman only a few inches taller than Sue, was hurrying up and down the hall, jabbing her wand at the other portraits until they were quiet.

“Sorry about the ruckus, Sirius,” he was saying as, with a final grunt of effort, they managed to close the drapes. The portrait abruptly fell silent, though Sue’s ears still rang.

“S’alright,” Sirius said casually, though he was careful to keep his voice low. “Any little thing sets her off.” He brushed his hair out of his face with a sigh, then caught sight of Sue standing hesitantly on the bottom stair and gave her a friendly little wave.

At the gesture, the rest of the hall’s occupants turned almost as one to stare curiously at Sue. She folded her hands in front of her stomach, to prevent herself from wringing them, and smiled nervously back at what could only be the Weasley family, minus the three older sons.

“Hang on, let’s get your things upstairs and settled, and then we’ll do introductions somewhere we can actually talk,” Sirius whispered. He pulled out his wand and with a wave, the trunks and suitcases rose gently to hover in the air. Sue hurriedly stepped out of the way as the luggage began floating silently up the stairs, under Sirius’s careful direction.

The Weasleys quietly followed this strange procession upstairs, leaving Sue to bring up the rear. She remained on the landing, listening, as Sirius settled the Weasleys into their respective rooms, apologizing for the slight dust and damp. Her heart pounded; Sue was unaccountably nervous.

Once their luggage was put away, Sirius led the Weasleys back downstairs; Sue stepped aside to let them pass and then followed them through a nearby door in the entry hall, down a flight of narrow stone stairs which she knew must lead to the kitchen in the basement. She noticed too that the stone stairs also went up. Presumably it was a servant’s stairwell, although house elves certainly did not need stairs to get around.

Sue had been prepared for the kitchen to be large, but the room beyond the door at the bottom of the stone steps was not just large. It was, indeed, cavernous, not just in its size but also in the way their footsteps echoed loudly against the dank, dark stone walls and ceiling. A huge unlit fireplace—large enough to roast a whole cow, though it currently contained only a fat black cauldron—dominated the far end of the room. Dozens of heavy iron pots and pans hung from the ceiling, just barely visible in the gloom cast by the few guttering gas lamps mounted on the walls. In the middle of the room there was a long wooden table, battered and splintered, with a number of half-burned candles stuck directly to the surface in its center.

“Sorry, I’m a terrible host,” Sirius said, waving his wand at the fireplace; it burst into flame, immediately dispelling the gloom and chill, though only somewhat.

 “Let me introduce you all to Sue Smith. Sue, this is the Weasley family, I think I mentioned that they would be coming to help get this place in order?”

Sue nodded and smiled at each of the Weasleys in turn as they all shook hands. Arthur had a friendly sort of grip, while Molly smiled at her kindly and shifted the large bag slung over her shoulder so she could press both her hands around Sue’s. Gangly, awkward Ron removed his hand from his pocket only long enough to shake hers; the twins grabbed her hands and shook them both at the same time, introducing themselves in unison with identical wicked grins, and she could not help but chuckle; Ginny gave her an almost shy smile as she clasped her hand.

Now that they were away from the hall, they were safe to talk, yet the Weasleys were still oddly subdued; Sue glanced at Sirius and saw that he was bemused as well.

“Well,” he said, bracingly, “I hope your trip over was better than the arrival, eh?”

At this, there was a choked sob. Sue looked around, a bit startled. Mrs. Weasley’s face was very pale, and she seemed to be holding back tears with a great effort. Her husband’s face was equally grim, although he looked more angry than distressed.

“Here now,” Sirius said, looking around at all the Weasleys in alarm. “What’s happened?”

Arthur’s hands tightened into fists at his sides, while Molly put hers over her face. The Weasley children exchanged solemn glances. “It’s Percy,” said one of the twins (Sue had no idea which) in a flat voice. “He’s been promoted to Junior Assistant to the Minister, so he’s thrown his lot in with the Ministry.”

“Wants nothing to do with Dumbledore and the Order. Or Harry, apparently,” the other twin said, his voice equally flat.

Sirius made a silent “oh” of comprehension. Sue repressed a wince. She had forgotten about Percy’s fallout with the rest of the family. If she remembered correctly, it must have happened just before the Weasleys left to come here. No wonder they all looked so grim.

“Ah. Er. Well. How about some tea, then?” Sirius gabbled awkwardly, already walking backwards to the pantry. “Everyone sit, make yourselves at home.”

They all gathered around the end of the table closest to the fire and took a seat, as Sirius busied himself with the tea things. Sue sat on the outside of the group, farthest from the fire. She felt strangely uncomfortable around the Weasleys, and did not know quite what to do or say to them.

Normally Sue did not care much what others thought of her, which made it easy to behave exactly as she wanted. On the page, she had liked the Weasleys immensely, but in the flesh there was a distinct possibility that they would not return the sentiment, and the idea made her uneasy. She shifted awkwardly in her chair, sitting up too straight and fiddling with the cuffs of her sleeves.

“So, Sue, is it?” said Arthur, leaning towards her over the table and smiling. He was still a little pale and his tone too hearty, but he seemed determined to steer the conversation away from family strife. “What brings you under Sirius’s roof with us?”

“Are you a relative of Sirius’s?” Ginny piped up, craning her neck to look at Sue with interest from her seat further down the table.

Sue opened her mouth, but no words were forthcoming. Luckily, one of the twins came to her rescue.

“She must be part of the Order, right Dad?” he said eagerly, elbowing his twin.

Arthur frowned. “Boys, you should know better than to bring the Order up in front of a stranger. It’s a secret, remember. We only told you because you’ll be living here all summer while the Order comes and goes.”

The twins rolled their eyes in unison. “We figured she must know too, since she’s living here. We’re not stupid, Dad,” the other twin said with exaggerated patience.

“Fair point,” Arthur admitted. Now all the Weasleys were looking at Sue expectantly. She had a bizarre urge to flee, but checked it.

“Actually, no, I’m not related to the Blacks. And I do know about the Order, but I’m not an Order member, exactly,” she admitted, wringing her hands nervously under the table. “I’m a Muggle.”

Now the Weasleys looked very interested indeed, especially Arthur. “Really?” he exclaimed, leaning even further over the table, as if to see her and her Muggle-ness better.

“Arthur,” murmured Molly disapprovingly. Sue noticed her eyes were still red. Arthur merely grinned. “This brings my count up to six,” he said delightedly. “My first American Muggle, too!”

Sue noticed Ron rolling his eyes and grinned back.

“But what’s a Muggle doing at Order headquarters?” Ginny asked.

“It’s…sort of a long story,” Sue hedged. To her relief, Sirius rejoined them just then, balancing a heavy silver tea tray laden with tea things in one hand and clutching a bottle full of amber liquid in the other.

“The biscuits are store-bought, sorry. I can’t get Kreacher to make anything remotely edible,” he said as he set the tray down and began passing down cups and saucers. They were delicate pale china with silver along the rim. Sue looked inside of the bottom of her cup before Sirius could fill it with tea and noticed that there was a design there: black snakes, twining together to form a large, ornate letter “B.”

When the biscuits came around to where she was sitting, Sue’s stomach growled loudly enough that the whole company turned to look at her. “Sorry,” she said, flushing. “I guess I forgot to eat today, with all the excitement.”

“Poor dear,” Mrs. Weasley said, sniffling slightly as she began to rummage through the large bag she carried. “I brought some food from the house, nothing much, but more substantial than biscuits, at any rate. I’ll fix some sandwiches.”

“Thank you, Molly. That’s very kind of you,” Sue replied, too hungry to attempt a polite refusal.

As Sirius showed Molly around the kitchen, Sue sat quietly with her hands wrapped around her tea for warmth and listened to Arthur and the children chatter about what they would be doing tomorrow to begin making Grimmauld Place into a proper headquarters. In a trice, Molly was setting down a plateful of sandwiches on the table before them. Sue was grateful for ever-hungry teenagers; it would have been awkward to be the only one eating.

“So, dear,” began Molly as Sue poured herself a bit more tea, “have you any Wizarding family?”

The bite of sandwich Sue was swallowing nearly caught in her throat. She shook her head and stalled by taking a sip of tea.

“My family is dead,” she finally answered, more flatly than she meant to; the whole room fell silent.

“Oh,” Molly gasped, and to Sue’s horror, tears came to her eyes. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“It’s alright. I didn’t mean to be short with you. I’m still…coming to terms with it, I suppose.”

Molly patted Sue’s arm comfortingly. “I know how hard that can be. I lost two brothers in the last war. Was it…You-Know-Who?”

“Oh, no, no. It wasn’t Voldemort.” Everyone except Sirius and Ginny flinched slightly at Sue’s use of the name. “It was an accident.”

“Oh, I see. How terrible. I’m so sorry, for your loss.”

Sue swallowed thickly around the lump in her throat. “Thank you,” she whispered.

The rest of the table resumed their eating and conversation. After a few moments, Molly leaned closer to Sue with an almost conspiratorial air.

“If I’m being too nosy, feel free to tell me so, but I’m curious. How did you and Sirius meet?”

Sue took in Molly’s knowing expression and nearly laughed. “It’s not like that Molly, sorry if I’ve disappointed you. I only met Sirius this morning. It’s a long story, but suffice it to say that I needed a place to stay, so Professor Dumbledore asked Professor Snape to escort me here. He thought it would be the safest place for me.”

Molly did look a trifle disappointed, to Sue’s amusement, but she rallied quickly. “Well, there’s time for that kind of thing still, I suppose. I often think that if Sirius would just settle down with the right girl, it could do wonders for him.”

Molly still looked speculative. _Better nip that notion in the bud_ , Sue thought.

“Perhaps you’re right Molly. Unfortunately I don’t think I’m suited for that particular role,” she replied wryly.

The little party was beginning to break up. All of the Weasleys looked tired, and in rapid succession they excused themselves to retire upstairs. Sue was left alone with Sirius in the kitchen.

“I’m sorry about your family. Dumbledore didn’t mention it,” Sirius said quietly as she helped him put away the tea things.

“Thanks. It’s alright. It happened over a year ago now, and it’s not related to why Dumbledore sent me here.”

“Why _did_ Dumbledore send you? If you don’t mind me asking,” Sirius said, putting down the dishrag he was using to wipe the table in order to give her his full attention.

Sue leaned against the back of a chair with a sigh. “I don’t mind you asking, exactly. But I don’t really want to talk about it right now. I’m sorry. It’s too long and too confusing—and too unbelievable, frankly—to get into at this hour.”

“Right then. Maybe another time you can explain,” he replied easily, though his eyes were intent and searching as they tracked over her face, looking for a clue.

Sue smiled at him tiredly. “I promise to try, at least.”

With that, they retired upstairs in silence.

The candles Kreacher had lit earlier in Sue’s room had burnt out. Sue did not expect to be able to sleep, not after her marathon nap earlier, but when she lay down on her bed in her darkened room and closed her eyes, she fell into a deep sleep.

And dreamed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long to get out. I have much of the next chapter already planned, so hopefully it will be quicker writing. This chapter is a bit boring, but the next one will start with a bang. So to speak.
> 
> At the beginning of the chapter, second paragraph, Sue is quoting from the epic poem "Balder" by Sydney Dobell.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	7. An Unwelcome Guest

 

  _I go out walkin' after midnight_

_Out in the starlight, just hoping you may be_

_Somewhere a-walkin' after midnight_

_Searchin' for me._

_-_ Patsy Cline, _Walking After Midnight_

 

_She was standing in front of Grimmauld Place, under the moonlight. It was so silent. Too silent for London, and the stars visible overhead were brighter and greater in number than even what she could see from her backyard, back home._

_There was a noise behind her, and then another, soft scratching sounds made by shoes scraping against gravel. She did not turn. She knew who was coming._

_His breath fell hot on the back of her neck, making her shudder, but not from cold._

_‘I wonder, are you a skilled actress, or just a madwoman?’ His voice whispered in her ear, soft and cruel. She shivered again._

_The headlights loomed large in front of her, blinding; she could hear the brakes squealing but it was still coming fast, much too fast, she could not get out of the way—_

_I’mgoingtodieI’mgoingtodieohgodno—_

Sue woke up with a gasp, fighting to untangle herself from the bed sheets. The hair at the back of her neck was soaked with sweat, and as she wiped more cold sweat from her brow, she shivered, her heart racing and her breath stuttering in her chest. The darkness around her was total. _At least this time I know where I am,_ she thought as she caught her breath.

Finally managing to unwind the sheet from around her legs, Sue stumbled out of bed. With a grimace, she pulled off the sweat-soaked oversize t-shirt she had been using as a nightgown and discarded it carelessly on top of the pile of yesterday’s clothing she had left at the foot of her bed. She desperately needed a shower.

Naked and only half awake, her mind still preoccupied with her nightmare, Sue groped her way blindly to the tapestry hiding the bathroom door and ducked underneath it to fumble the door open. She paused in the open doorway, bewildered.

The room behind the tapestry was still a bathroom, but there the similarity ended. This room was sterile white and starkly utilitarian where the other had been black marble and luxury, and it was lit, not with candles, but with a harsh, unforgiving white light from a fixture overhead.

Sue looked over her shoulder at the room behind her, feeling an absurd conviction that it too might have changed in the night; the light from the changed bathroom was bright enough to illuminate the rumpled bed behind her, just as she’d left it. The room around it appeared to be unchanged.

Sue peered blearily at the white walls before her, then shrugged. Well, it had a toilet, which was her most pressing concern at the moment.

The huge black claw-footed bathtub had apparently turned into a very plain porcelain one, with a white plastic hose attached to its faucet, connecting it to a shower head suspended from the ceiling.  Sue drew back the clear plastic curtains—they slid over the curved rod encircling the tub with a clatter that echoed loudly off the tile wall and floor—and clambered in. The cold sweat drying on her skin was making her shiver, and a hot shower seemed just the thing.

Once she had the water steaming and running over her bent head, Sue belatedly realized that she had forgotten her toiletries. “Shit,” she muttered through the stream of water flowing over her mouth. _Oh well_ , she thought as she turned around to face the spray. She could at least rinse off now and then take a real shower with soap in the morning

Blinking hot water out of her eyes, she realized that there was already a partially used bar of soap on a little shelf just above the faucet, as well as a pair of unlabeled bottles which, when she opened them and sniffed, smelled powerfully of rosemary. After a moment’s thought, she poured a little of the unknown stuff into her palm. It foamed when she rubbed her hands together, so Sue poured a little more out into her palm and began lathering up.

As she tilted her head to make sure her masses of hair became fully soaked, she glanced casually to her left, through the shower curtain.

There was a man standing there, watching her.

Sue screamed.

_______________________________________________________________

 

From an early age, Severus had found it advantageous to sleep lightly. When he was a boy, before Hogwarts, he had learned to always keep one ear open, especially late at night, for the sound of the front door slamming, announcing his father’s return from wherever he’d gone to knock back a few. He needed to be able to wake up at once and hide himself somewhere unreachable, where his father wouldn’t think to look for him. The habit remained useful throughout his dormitory days and had eventually become a permanent part of his sleeping cycle.

Thus, when the sound of water running in his bathroom reached his ears, Severus came awake at once, his hand already grasping his wand beneath the pillow. He pushed back the covers and swung his feet to the floor silently, wand at the ready, straining to hear.

Whoever was in his bathroom had somehow gotten past his wards without breaking them, he realized as he crept towards the door. He would have felt it immediately.

Why in Merlin’s name would anyone break into his quarters to use his _shower?_

Hand hovering over the knob, preparing to throw the door open, Severus hesitated. Who could it be in there? A house elf? But even they would have had to pass the wards, and when Severus was sleeping, nothing alive could cross them without waking him instantly.

Pulling his hand back, Severus instead Vanished the door with a mute flick of his wand.

There was a woman in his shower.

Severus stared in disbelief, taking in the sight without comprehension. Her form was blurry through the plastic curtain, but he could see that she was short and broad at hip and shoulder, with an ample chest, an hourglass waist, and slab-like thighs. Her arm was raised over her head and she appeared to be soaping her underarms.

With his soap. The smell of rosemary hung unmistakably in the humid air.

Severus was still standing frozen in the doorway, his instincts flown in the face of this baffling turn of events, when the woman suddenly turned her head and noticed him.

She screamed. He saw her recoil in shock through the curtain; her feet slid out from under her and she flailed her arms, clutching at the shower curtain frantically to break her fall. Several of the metal rings ripped free. The woman landed heavily on her hip and cried out again, this time in pain. She disappeared from sight below the rim of the tub.

The woman struggled to sit up as Severus finally forced his legs back into motion and moved closer. He could hardly make out her features through the heavy curtain of wet hair that tumbled past her shoulders and obscured her face. Still, Severus recognized her, his stomach clenching nastily.

“Miss Smith,” he forced out through numb lips, struggling against the adrenaline flooding his veins. His arm seemed a separate thing from the rest of him; he was gratified to note that it did not shake, nor did his wand waver from where it pointed steadily at the intruder. His pulse roared in his eardrums, racing.

She was half lying, half sitting on the floor, the water falling unheeded on her back as she clung to the side of the tub with one arm and clawed the wet hair out of her eyes with her free hand. When the girl heard his voice she suddenly froze, staring up at him with eyes huge in her bloodless face, mouth gaping like a fish.

 _Like a mermaid, you mean,_ his traitor brain whispered as his gaze flicked helplessly back down to her bare chest. She was pressing against the side of the tub, obscuring the view, but he could still see−

Too much, far too much. He forced his eyes back to her face and tried to keep impassive, although he could feel a blush rising hot on his face.

The girl seemed not to notice, but as her initial shock began to fade, her own face quickly turned an alarming shade of bright red.

“What are you doing here?” the girl gasped hoarsely, huddling close against the side of the tub in a futile attempt to preserve her modesty, forcing her to crane her head back to keep seeing his face.

Severus bristled at the implied accusation, and gratefully reached for the familiar feeling of outrage that filled him, replacing his confusion and dismay.

“What am _I_ doing here?” he hissed back, drawing himself up to his full height. She flinched at the venom in his voice and he felt a hot, malicious stab of pleasure. She had frightened him, and worse, disturbed his equilibrium, made him feel foolish and ashamed. His earlier resolve to patiently gain her trust and thus gain influence over her, to curb his temper and his cruel tongue, was instantly forgotten.

“You will explain to me exactly how and why you are in _my private quarters_ , using _my shower_ and _my soap_ , in the middle of the night,” Severus bit out, fairly shaking with rage. “ _Immediately_ ,” he snarled, wanting her to flinch again. Instead she merely goggled up at him, face blank.

“Could I get dressed first?” she finally said, her voice small and pinched.

Severus turned away, motions jerky with fury, and snatched a towel from the folded stack on the counter between the shower and the sink. He dropped it onto her head and stalked out of the bathroom, his hands clenched in tight fists at his sides.

No longer in the same room with the infuriating, unsettling trespasser who had rattled him so, the fog of temper clouding his thoughts subsided somewhat. He forced himself to relax his death-grip on his wand and take deep, slow breaths. He could not afford to lose control.

After a moment, he sensed the girl standing behind him. He turned deliberately, willing his face into a mask of calm, cool detachment. She had wrapped the towel he’d given her around her body, tucked under her armpits, and taken another to twist around her hair, gathering it on top of her head in an improvised turban. Her face was still fiery red. Severus noted that the blush extended down to her chest and then immediately tried not to notice anything else about her from the neck down.

“I don’t have my clothes,” she said in a strained voice, her eyes fixed on his bare feet. “Do you…do you have anything you would be willing to, uh, lend me?”

Severus had to admit that it would be easier to keep his equilibrium if the girl was properly clothed. Wordlessly, he rummaged in his wardrobe and seized an old pair of robes that he tossed at the girl without looking at her. He continued to look away until she slipped the robes over her head, letting the towel fall once they covered her. The robes puddled around her ankles and swallowed her hands all the way to her fingertips; only her head was left visible above the high collar.

Feeling suddenly self-conscious in his long grey nightshirt, Severus snatched his dressing gown from where it hung next to his mirror and belted it around himself like armor.

“Now. Explain,” he said, pleased that he still managed to sound cold and commanding despite his still-racing heartbeat and his intense discomfort.

“I…” the girl faltered and looked around his bedchamber helplessly, as if the explanation might be found on one of the walls. “I can’t. I mean, I don’t know. Is this your room? At Hogwarts?”

“Obviously,” he sneered, needing to vent his spleen at least a little if he was to have any hope of keeping his temper reined in. “Thus again I ask you: what are you doing here, and _how did you get in?”_

The girl still did not look at him, though he could see that her face was twisted with anxiety, and no small amount of confusion. “I don’t know,” she repeated, her voice wavering.

“I do not believe you,” he hissed. “You did not _accidentally_ find yourself in my bathroom, without any idea of how you arrived there.”

She stared up at him unhappily, wringing her hands; belatedly he realized that he had moved towards her unconsciously in order to use his greater height to intimidate her, and he stepped back, suppressing a flinch. If her expression and body language were anything to go by, she was intimidated enough, at any rate.

“I can’t explain it,” she said beseechingly. “I was in my room at Grimmauld Place, but when I opened the door to the bathroom, it wasn’t the same bathroom anymore. I-I didn’t realize it was yours,” she stammered, staring at the floor. “I’m sorry.”

“What?” Severus said, blankly.

“I said, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have intruded on you like this on purpose,” she said, finally looking him in the eye, although her face was now so flushed it was nearly purple.

Severus realized he was gaping and quickly schooled his expression back into impassivity.

“I don’t understand. Are you telling me that somehow your room spontaneously connected itself to my bathroom?”

The girl gave a tiny shrug. The movement caused the towel piled on top of her head to slide until it leaned drunkenly to the right. “I know it sounds insane, but I swear, that’s what happened.”

Severus was at a loss. Obviously what the girl was telling him could not be right, yet he had no other explanation for how she could have slipped past his wards and arrived in his shower. He did not think that she was lying to him about what had happened either. Her discomfort mirrored his own; there was no trace of deception that he could see in either her expression or body language.

Not knowing what else to do, he went over and examined the doorway to his bathroom, looking for any sign, physical or magical. He found nothing, and after a moment he stepped back, returned his door to existence with an irritated flick, and stared at it in consternation.

“Now what?” the girl asked, having moved closer while he was preoccupied and now standing at his elbow. Severus jumped slightly and then rounded on her with a scowl.

“Tell me exactly what happened before you found yourself in my bathroom, and do not leave out even the most trivial detail,” he commanded. She frowned at him, but did not protest.

“Well, I woke up from a nightmare. I’m not exactly sure what time, but it couldn’t have been more than half an hour ago,” she began slowly, her eyes unfocused as she recalled the specifics. “I needed the bathroom, and I was all sweaty, so I wanted a shower too. I took off my nightshirt, then I went to my bathroom door. There’s a tapestry hanging over it, so I had to move that first. Then I opened the door, and instead of my bathroom I found yours.”

“Didn’t you find that at all unusual?” he asked, unable to rein in his sarcasm.

The girl huffed. “Of course I did. But I figured it was just more magic, you know? I thought the bathroom had changed itself somehow, that’s all. And I really needed to use the bathroom, so I didn’t waste too much time asking questions.”

“Bathrooms do not normally _change themselves_ , Miss Smith. Even with magic,” Severus replied dryly.

“Well, what do I know about bathrooms in magic households? It certainly never would have occurred to me that I’d somehow opened a door onto an entirely different bathroom that wasn’t even in the same damned house!” she snapped back, throwing up her hands in the air in impatience.

Severus supposed she did have a point, there. He had never even heard of such a thing happening, not even in cases of accidental magic, which were known for getting decidedly weird.

He had definitely never heard of such a thing happening when the person in question did not possess any magic at all.

“Are you certain that you do not have any magical abilities?” Severus asked, the question already out before he could think better of asking it.

“I—” The girl paused in the middle of her automatic denial, then sighed. “I’m not certain of anything at all, lately,” she answered ruefully. Her towel turban slipped down further, covering her eye, and she shoved it back irritably. “Is there an easy, harmless way to test it?”

Dumbledore would be able to test her for any traces of magic. But there was little sense in waking him at this hour to find out. “Not at the moment,” he replied. “It will have to wait until morning.”

The girl fiddled with the overlong sleeves of the robe he had given her. “And until then?”

“Until then, you’ll just have to stay here, Miss Smith. Not here,” he amended hastily when the blush returned to her cheeks. “You’ll sleep out in my sitting room. On the couch.”

The girl nodded. “Thank you,” she said, as he showed her to the door. Severus did not reply. What else was he going to do, put her out in the corridor?

Rather than bother lighting the lamps, Severus illuminated the tip of his wand so that the girl could find her way to his sofa. It was short, but then so was she. She ought to be reasonably comfortable there.

She sat herself down without complaint, unwinding the towel from her damp hair. The weight of the moisture it still held dragged the locks down so that they hung in waves instead of their usual springy curls and tight kinks. She was shivering, he suddenly realized, and so wordlessly he conjured her a thick blanket.

“Thank you,” she murmured again as he traded it for her damp towel. Her eyes seemed huge in her face as she held his gaze; without hesitating, Severus gave into the temptation and slipped down into her thoughts. He sensed mostly her hot, throbbing embarrassment there, which was not unexpected. But there was something else there as well, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on—

The girl licked her lips nervously, and Severus nearly recoiled.

Desire. That was the emotion that lay almost buried underneath the girl’s mortification. It was vague, diffuse, yet unmistakable.

“Goodnight, Mr. Snape,” she said, breaking their eye contact to look down at the blanket in her hands. Severus merely jerked his head in acknowledgement, relieved at the dismissal. He fled the room as quickly as humanly possible without actually breaking into a run, shutting his bedroom door behind him with a snap.

Despite running through every Occlumency exercise he knew as he lay in bed in the dark, Severus was unable to distract himself from the girl just outside his bedroom, lying on his couch, wearing his clothes, and, inexplicably, attracted to him.

Sleep was, unsurprisingly, a long time in returning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I said I'd get this chapter up more quickly, but it didn't turn out at all like I planned, even though it did turn out shorter. I guess if I can manage to update at least once a month it's better than nothing, but I'll try to do better.  
> Thanks for reading!


	8. Secrets and Enigmas

 

_But what good is living for_

_When there's no knock on the door?_

_No shelter from the war_

_Against me_

_But if you comfort me till dawn,_

_I'd sing your lonesome song_

_Pack my things,_

_I'll get gone, faithlessly._

-Two Gallants, _The Trembling of the Rose_

 

Sleeping the day before away had robbed her of the ability to sleep now, it seemed, so Sue lay awake, wrapped in the blanket Snape had given her, listening to the deep silence of the castle in the early morning hours, complete and unbroken by even the smallest vibration.   

Her heart pounded fast in her chest, spurred by a heady, bewildering mix of elation and dismay. The sound of her own pulse seemed loud in her ears, making the silence seem thicker in comparison. She cleared her throat softly just to make sure her ears were still working, or perhaps that sound still existed.

Sue shifted restlessly, unable to find a comfortable position on the narrow sofa. She flopped over onto her stomach with a heavy sigh and pulled the blanket over her head. “Fuck,” she whispered softly into the cushion, wishing that sleep would come and shut off her droning, unrelenting thoughts.

It had taken at least an hour for her blushes to stop heating her skin from head to toe whenever her thoughts returned to what had happened. Three hours later, her cheeks still felt warm.

Sue was not as a rule embarrassed by nudity, her own or others. She’d gotten into the habit of visiting public baths as an undergrad and thus had lost any shyness about her naked body that she had once possessed. There was nothing like being naked in a room full of other naked women of every different age, shape, and color to make one feel comfortable in one’s own skin.

Snape seeing her naked was different though, evidently. It made her feel—

Mortified, mainly, she supposed. Uncomfortable, not because she felt she had done anything wrong (not on purpose at least), but because she couldn’t envision what she should say or do in order to put the moment behind them, to return their interactions to something resembling equilibrium.

But there was something else she wasn’t able to identify: something that added to the hot blush she still felt overtake her face whenever she recalled the way his eyes had flicked down to her chest and back up to her face, yet when Sue compared the unfamiliar emotion to what she had felt in other situations where she had been humiliated in some way, it did not feel like embarrassment at all.

Perhaps the feeling was merely a reaction to the shock he had given her, some sort of strange adrenaline response. She couldn’t be sure; she had no frame of reference for such an experience, which left her adrift when it came to decoding her emotional response to it.

Sue had no idea what the feeling was. It was brand new. Outside her experience.

Oddly, the novelty of the whole situation impressed itself on Sue even more than the unexpectedness or the unpleasantness of it. As far as she could be certain, she’d never been seen naked by a man before, not unless you counted her father and brother, and she had been very small then.

It was a weird sensation. She kept coming back to it again and again in her mind, running over it the same way a tongue runs over the spot where a tooth has recently fallen out, helplessly probing the strangeness in order to make it familiar, to know it.

The other major train of thought that Sue kept running over and over instead of sleeping was to wonder how in the hell she had managed it.

It could not be a coincidence, she knew that much. She had somehow inexplicably appeared near the place that Snape just happened to be twice now, in as many days. It could not be a coincidence.

It seemed likely too that _she_ had done it somehow: transported herself, instantly and without even realizing it, in a way that people who had _actual magic_ and used it all the time were at a loss to explain.

Or at least, they claimed to be. From Snape at least, she was inclined to believe it, but Dumbledore was a different story. She liked the old wizard a great deal, after speaking with him only once, but she did not trust him. She could imagine too easily him weighing the idea of sharing the information or the insights he might have about her, about how she was doing whatever it was she was doing, against the possibility that doing so might hurt the Order’s chances of reaping the benefits of her future knowledge.

Sue was under no illusions about where his priorities would lie, if faced with such a decision. She couldn’t even blame him.

But she couldn’t trust him, either.

Still, it was possible he would be able to help her. And she couldn’t afford to be choosy about allies, not when she was doubly vulnerable, to the looming threat of magic of course, but also because here she was a lost stranger among strangers. No one to miss her. No one to protest if something should happen to her.

She thought of Blanche DuBois, always dependent upon the kindness of strangers. Sue felt like she knew these people, but she knew that was only an illusion.  She could not be certain her idea of them would match their reality, and they had great powers that could easily be turned against her, powers that she was defenseless against.

Most likely she was defenseless.

 If it was true, if she was really able to transport instantly across distances, across _dimensions,_ or _realities,_ somehow—then what did that mean?

Where did it come from?

And what else might she be able to do, without even consciously knowing it?

 _What am I?_ Sue heard like a whisper in her thoughts, and shied away from the question.

_I’m ordinary. I’m ordinary. There’s nothing special or strange about me._

_I’m just Sue._

_I’m ordinary._

But no matter how many times Sue repeated it, she could not quite make herself believe it.

_______________________________________________________________

 

Sue awoke with a start, heart pounding, at the sound of Snape’s bedroom door opening. Apparently she had been wrong about not being able to go back to sleep. She sat up, rubbing her eyes and surreptitiously patting down her hair. She had carefully braided it after Snape had left her, in order to mitigate the damage going to sleep with it wet would do. She wasn’t sure why all of a sudden it mattered to her. Usually, unless she was going to work and needed to look professional, she just let her hair take whatever shape it seemed inclined to, as it was mostly a vain effort to persuade it to do anything else.

She supposed that when it came to Snape’s impression of her, her hair was really the least of her worries.

“Ah. Good morning,” he said stiffly, closing his door behind him with a snap. He was fully dressed, in robes similar to the ones he had been wearing the night she had first seen him. Similar to the ones she was wearing now, that he had given her.

Sue busied herself with folding up the blanket neatly, as an excuse not to look at him. She was very aware of how naked she was underneath her borrowed clothing. At least they buttoned at the wrist, so her arm didn’t show.

“Good morning,” she murmured in reply, glancing at him from under her eyelashes. She thought she saw his fingers twitch slightly but she couldn’t be sure.

“Would you like some tea?” he asked, after a silence that seemed too long.

“Tea would be lovely,” she replied, flashing him a smile without meeting his eyes.

Snape cleared his throat. “Tea, for two. Please,” he said, addressing the empty air in a tone of polite but firm command. 

A tea tray, fully laid out, popped into existence at the small table near the fireplace. Sue jumped.

Snape raised an eyebrow at her and she struggled not to blush, again.

“House elves,” he said shortly by way of explanation, inclining his head towards the table.

“Yes, of course,” she snapped back, unable to keep her sudden irritation completely out of her tone. A glance at his expression showed that his eyebrow was raised again, but he said nothing, merely conjured another chair and offered her a seat with an elegant, perhaps ironic sweep of his hand.

Uncertain whether she was being mocked, Sue decided the best course of action would be to just ignore it. She sat.

Snape served her tea before taking his own, and they sipped in silence that seemed to grow more and more heavy and uncomfortable the longer it continued. Sue kept her eyes on her tea, unable to think of a single thing to say that could overcome the awkwardness that lay between them.

She could not remember being more tongue-tied in her life, ever, and it rankled as much as it shamed her. This was not who she was. She did not act like this. But Snape, it seemed, was able to bring out a shrinking-violet side of her that Sue had not even known she possessed.

Frankly, she hated it.

“I could ask the house elves for some breakfast,” Snape said, and the sudden sound of his deep voice made Sue twitch hard enough to slop tea over the rim of her cup and onto the table. She flushed and dabbed at it hastily with her napkin, biting back a swear.

“If you would like some.”

“No, no thank you,” Sue replied quickly, dropping her napkin back in her lap. Her esophagus seemed to have transformed into a solid block of wood sometime in the night; she could barely drink her tea, and the idea of trying to swallow any food seemed almost laughable.

Snape set his own tea cup back in its saucer with a decisive clink of china against china. “The headmaster is likely awake. If we leave now, we can catch him before he leaves his office.”

Sue nodded, setting down her own tea. “I’m ready if you are.”

The castle was as empty and silent as it had been the morning before. The stone floor was icy against Sue’s bare feet; they stung for the first few paces, but quickly turned numb. Once they emerged from the slightly dank halls of the dungeon levels into the great hall, Sue could tell that the sun had barely risen over the grounds. Still, even the dim dawn light that managed to make its way in through the lofty leaded glass windows was sufficient to wash out the light of the torches flickering on the walls.

They climbed back up the main staircase, but instead of turning down the first floor corridor that led to the tower which held the hospital wing, Snape continued up, pausing at each landing only long enough for the staircases to finish shifting.

Sue’s thighs burned with the exertion, but she did not ask him to slow down, saving her breath for the climb. She had no heart for enjoying the unlooked-for opportunity to observe more of Hogwarts, and Snape’s pace gave her no room to dawdle at any rate, so she concentrated instead on not tripping over her own bare feet or the hem of her borrowed robes.

They did not look at each other, but nevertheless Sue sensed his regard on her as they ascended. His posture was stiff and tense, almost as if he expected her to try to slip away and was poised to prevent her. She stayed as close to his side as she could without risking bumping into him; she wanted to reassure him, but didn’t like to think of the awkwardness that touching him could trigger.

Sue had lost count of the landings they had passed by the time Snape abruptly turned left, leading her down a corridor and past a series of stone gargoyles, leering out at them from shadowy niches evenly spaced along the walls. He paused at the second-to-last one on the right, waiting for her to catch up. She followed as swiftly as she could without actually running, trying not to pant openly for breath.

 She expected him to give the password immediately and sweep them both inside, but instead Snape hesitated, looking at her with narrowed eyes, one finger tracing his upper lip thoughtfully.

“What?” Sue asked, breathlessly, and felt herself blush yet again. _Damn everything._

“I’d like to try an—experiment, of sorts,” he replied blandly, stepping back from the gargoyle and beckoning her forward. Warily, Sue stepped closer to the gargoyle, until she was face to face with its frozen snarl.

“What do you want me to do?” Sue asked, glancing at Snape obliquely, flicking her eyes back to the gargoyle’s before they could meet his. The blank stone orbs seriously creeped her out, but at least they couldn’t see into her thoughts.

Something about the stone statue made her feel strange. Like there was an itch in her brain, and she wanted to scratch.

“Do whatever you would do if you wished it to open to you.”

Sue turned her head to glance at him again, thinking of the door to Grimmauld Place, how it had opened at her touch. Snape’s expression revealed nothing, but she was sure that was what this was all about.

Sue reached out and laid her palm flat on the top of the gargoyle’s head. Nothing happened for a moment. Snape shifted next to her, but Sue paid him no mind; she was distracted by the itch deep in her mind, which had grown stronger. She bore down with her hand against the stone, imagining she was bearing down on that itch instead.

Nothing happened. Sue pursed her lips. On one level, she felt silly for expecting anything different−−of course she couldn’t open up magic secret doors with her mind. But yesterday she had indeed done just that. What was different this time?

She didn’t think that itch was just her imagination, either. She hadn’t felt anything like it yesterday when she opened up Grimmauld Place, though. What did that signify?

Perhaps she was thinking about this in the wrong way. The gargoyle did not look like a door, but it functioned as one. Sue shifted her hand from the top of the gargoyle’s head and grasped one of the gargoyle’s talons, trying to think of it as a doorknob. She pictured it turning smoothly, envisioned the statue swinging forward on a hinge. She wanted to be on the other side, and so it must open for her.

The gargoyle suddenly leapt aside, yanking its talon out of her grasp and causing Sue to gasp and stagger backwards. The wall behind where it had stood split open with a groan of stone grinding against stone, revealing a spiral staircase whose revolving stone steps seemed to rise endlessly up into the dimness above. The steps did not flow up like an escalator, yet still they somehow ascended as the staircase turned. Looking at them made Sue dizzy; they were like an impossible Escher sketch come to life.

Sue looked at Snape. He was staring into the open passage, but his eyes suddenly shifted and caught hers, as if he felt the weight of her gaze on him. His face was impassive, but the way his black eyes glittered sent a tingle up Sue’s spine.

“After you,” he murmured, gesturing with another one of those ironically gallant sweeps of his hand. 

Sue repressed a sigh and strode inside the passage, concentrating again on not stumbling as she stepped onto one of the stone steps as it glided upwards. She ended up doing a clumsy sort of hop and narrowly avoided overbalancing right over the step’s edge. Snape joined her, stepping onto the stair below hers with a smooth, dignified motion that spoke of practice. The stone wall below them closed with the same sound of grating stone.

_______________________________________________________________

 

The headmaster looked tired, Severus noted as he shut the door behind himself and the girl, but he was fully dressed and did not look at all surprised to be receiving them. He suppressed the familiar sensation of irritation at the headmaster’s inscrutability and schooled his face into impassivity. It wouldn’t fool Dumbledore the way it fooled the Dark Lord, but it was better than nothing. He tried not to look at the girl next to him, dressed in his own robes, though he did not miss the way Dumbledore’s eye took in her appearance before they fixed on himself.

“Good morning, Severus,” he said, sitting back down behind his desk and conjuring a pair of squashy armchairs in front of it. The girl sat down without hesitation, folding her hands primly in her lap. After a moment of reluctance, Severus took a seat himself.

“I would inquire the reason behind this early morning visit, but as I received a very alarmed Floo call half an hour ago from Mr. Black, saying that Miss Smith had vanished from the house and could not be found, I believe I already know the answer,” Dumbledore said quietly, folding his gnarled hands over his Gryffindor red-and-gold desk blotter as he peered at them over the tops of his spectacles.

“I too was alarmed at this news, but then I had a strange thought. I hope you will forgive the intrusion on your privacy, Severus, but I sent a very trustworthy and discreet house-elf down to check your quarters. He reported that Miss Smith was there, safe and sound asleep on your couch. I did not see any need to disturb either of you, so I returned word to Sirius that you were safe and would return to Grimmauld Place later this morning.”

Severus tamped down on his knee-jerk outrage and merely gave the headmaster a nod in response. Better a house-elf than the headmaster himself snooping about in his private quarters. Besides, his wards allowed house-elves in the sitting area, so that they could complete their duties without disturbing him.

“If you don’t mind, I am quite curious to hear the events that preceded your sojourn on Severus’s sofa, Miss Smith. Especially since you managed not to set off a single one of my wards with your method of ingress,” Dumbledore said, smiling encouragingly as he addressed the girl sitting hunched before him. A slightly hunted expression bloomed over her pale face and she shrunk back slightly in her chair under the headmaster’s gaze. Severus felt a sudden stab of pity for her, knowing too well how uncomfortable it could be to have to explain yourself while underneath that piercing scrutiny.

Quickly and succinctly, she summarized the same sequence of events she had related to Severus the night before, without looking up from her hands folded in her lap. Severus gave his own version of events when Dumbledore turned to him, and when he had finished, the headmaster leaned back in his elaborately carved chair, stroking his beard thoughtfully, his eyes on the vaulted ceiling above.

“This is indeed a singular occurrence,” he murmured. “Miss Smith, I beg your forgiveness, for I know you must be tired and not at all in the mood to discuss weighty topics. But I am afraid that we must continue the conversation we were unable to finish last night. I do not think that we have the luxury of putting it off for later.”

The girl sighed and shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “It seems not, sir,” she agreed reluctantly. She took a deep breath, straightening her spine as she filled up her lungs, as if steeling herself for something unpleasant. Suddenly she turned to him and met his eye, her lips pressed into a thin white line.

“I’m sorry for this. But I have to ask that I speak to you alone, Headmaster,” she said in a slightly hoarse tone, not taking her eyes off of Severus’s. He blinked, then bit back a furious hiss as the implication sunk in.

The girl did not want him to overhear her confession to the headmaster. She mistrusted him, just the same as everyone else. How had he let himself hope for something different, even a little? Foolish, stupid mistake, relaxing his guard just because some silly child had made calf's eyes at him. He was truly slipping.

Severus turned to the headmaster, jaw clenched tightly enough to make his teeth ache, and saw at once that there would be no defense for him from that quarter. He rose abruptly to his feet, sweeping his robes clear of his feet as he spun to sneer down at the girl. She looked up at him in mute appeal, and reached out to delicately take hold of a fold of his robes between her thumb and forefinger.

It would have been easy to shake her off, to spit out something cutting and sweep out of the room before either of them had a chance to spot the hurt hiding beneath his rage. But something about the way she had reached out to him kept him rooted in place. He looked into her eyes, searching for the suspicion and the mistrust she held for him in her thoughts.

He did not find it. He found distress and guilt and fear, swirling together in a dark whirlwind, but when he pushed that aside and looked deeper, he sensed something else, and jerked out of her mind in shock. Severus’s nostrils flared and he stepped back reflexively, causing his robes to pull out of the girl’s loose grasp. He could not bear to look in her eyes again.

“Very well,” he said in a voice that sounded very cold and very far away to his ears. “I will leave you to your confidences, for now. But I have questions, and I will have answers. From both of you,” he challenged, thrusting his chin forward pugnaciously as he glared defiantly between them. The girl nodded meekly, hugging her elbows and staring down at the rug, while the headmaster only smiled at Severus, his blue eyes twinkling merrily.

Severus scowled and strode to the door, which opened at his approach. He took a savage satisfaction in slamming it shut behind him.

He would go down to the dungeons and brew something complex, something that would keep his thoughts occupied so he wouldn’t have time to dwell on what he’d seen in the girl’s mind. Her surface thoughts had been about him and about the headmaster, which he had expected, but when he had grasped for the associations linked to them, he discovered to his surprise that her fear mostly revolved around the figure of the headmaster. In contrast, weaving through her thoughts and memories of himself was a broad, fiercely tender streak of compassion and affection that he had found almost painful in its intensity.

He could not comprehend it. He was certain there must be some trick in it, some trap waiting to snare him in its clutches. He needed to stay strong and resist the temptation to believe that she actually cared for him, or it would surely destroy him.

Severus could not afford to weaken. He had one ambition and nothing could be allowed to interfere with it. He would play his part, and when the time came he would do what was necessary. There was no room in his damned, doomed existence for indulging wishful thinking, no possibility for anything tender or caring to touch the shriveled parts of himself that had died with Lily. That was not for him.

As if to underscore this thought, his left forearm blazed suddenly with a searing pain. He swore and clutched the skin there with his other hand, summoning his Occlumency barriers to ward off the agony. He turned abruptly away from the dungeon stairs and out the front doors, striding as quickly as possible without actually running.

His other master called for him, and there would be hell to pay if Severus kept him waiting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this update is so late in coming. I struggle with writing Dumbledore and the next chapter is going to be pretty dominated by him, so I've been writing at a snail's pace trying to figure out what he would say and do. It may be a while before I'm ready to give up tweaking it, so please be patient. Thanks for reading!


	9. Long Stories

_Pressure! Pushing down on me_   
_Pressing down on you, no man ask for_   
_Under pressure that burns a building down_   
_Splits a family in two_   
_Puts people on streets_   
  
_It's the terror of knowing_   
_What this world is about_   
_Watching some good friends_   
_Screaming, "Let me out!"_

_..._

_'Cause love's such an old-fashioned word_   
_And love dares you to care for_   
_The people on the edge of the night_   
_And love dares you to change our way of_   
_Caring about ourselves_   
_This is our last dance_   
_This is our last dance_   
_This is ourselves_   
_Under pressure!_

\- Queen,  _Under Pressure_ _  
_

 

The sound of the door slamming behind Snape echoed inside Sue’s head. She sat staring at her hands clenching and unclenching in her lap, listening to the soft whirrs and puffs emitted by the headmaster’s magical instruments, trying to steel herself for the difficult conversation ahead.

It had been hard telling Severus to leave, but it couldn’t be helped. Subterfuge was not one of Sue’s strengths, and she hoped she would not have to lie to Snape later, but this was going to be tricky enough without the added worry of him learning too much. Snape was essential; not only did he have a central role to play that Sue feared diverting him from, but the knowledge Sue was about to reveal might be fatal to him, if Voldemort caught wind of it.

Hopefully she would not have to lie to anyone, except perhaps by omission.

“May I offer you some breakfast, dear girl?”

Sue looked up. The headmaster was smiling at her kindly, seemingly quite calm and patient. But Sue could not help but notice the tense lines creasing his forehead, and the dark circles not quite hidden behind his half-moon spectacles. He looked as though his night had been even less restful than Sue’s, which was really saying something. Sue wondered what had kept him up. She supposed the list of possibilities was quite a long one.

 “No thank you, sir. I’m not very hungry.”

 “At least some tea, then. I find a cup of tea is a great comfort when one is distressed, if only because it gives one something to do with one’s hands.”

Sue felt the corners of her mouth turn up despite the knots in her stomach and the sudden lump in her throat. Unable to speak, she merely nodded in acquiescence.

 Instead of summoning a house-elf, Dumbledore produced his wand from his sleeve. A large, luridly purple tea pot appeared upon his desk blotter, flanked by two matching cups and saucers. Sue took a deep breath and tried to relax as he poured for them both.

“Milk? Sugar? Lemon?” As the headmaster named them, they appeared on the desk, lining themselves up neatly in a row. Sue shook her head. The only thing she ever took in her tea was honey, and even that rarely.

“I must say I am surprised that you wished to speak to me alone,” Dumbledore said in a light tone as he handed Sue her cup, his long arms reaching over the wide desk with ease. The desk was uncomfortably far from her chair for Sue’s considerably shorter arms, so she balanced the saucer on her knee, giving him a questioning look over the cup’s rim as she took a tentative sip. It was, of course, the perfect temperature.

“I expected you to ask Severus to remain,” he continued without looking at her, as he added a startling number of sugar cubes to his own cup and stirred.

Sue frowned. “Why would you expect that?”

“It is obvious that you trust him, just as it is obvious that you do not trust me,” he said, still not looking up from his deliberate tea-stirring.

Sue nearly upset her tea saucer, just barely managing to catch it on her fingertips, though she sloshed quite a lot of tea onto her borrowed robes in the process. “Ah, shit,” she hissed.

“Forgive me dear, how rude of me,” Dumbledore said, abandoning his own tea to conjure a spindly wicker table at Sue’s side. With another quick flick of his wand, the tea stain vanished. Sue set her cup and saucer down on the little table with shaking hands. “Sorry,” she muttered, her cheeks hot with embarrassment.

“You have nothing to apologize for, my dear. Neither for the tea, nor for the mistrust,” he replied. Despite his smile, his eyes were sad, she thought. He returned his attention to stirring his tea, as if he found it incredibly absorbing.

“I−” Sue began, but her voice cracked. She took a gulp of tea. “Snape couldn’t stay. It’s too dangerous for him to know some of the things that I need to talk to you about, and he’s in enough danger as it is.” _I just hope he forgives me for it._

“And…It’s not that I don’t trust you…well, I don’t exactly _not_ trust you…But I am worried.” Sue realized she was literally wringing her hands and made them lie still in her lap again.

 “I think I may be able to take a guess about what is worrying you. But I will not. I think it would be much better if you told me. In other words, I humbly ask for the chance to, if not put those worries to rest, at least address them honestly.”

Sue took a deep breath. “Of course. Yes.”

“The first thing,” she continued, slowly, “I have to ask you. Why did you leave Harry with the Dursleys?”

Dumbledore blinked. “Ah. Well. That is a complicated question. It has to do with the sacrifice Lily Potter made that night, and the blood shared between her, her sister Petunia Dursley, and Harry himself.”

“That’s not what I mean,” said Sue before he could continue, shaking her head emphatically. “I mean, what’s the _real_ reason you left him with them? Please.”

She was watching the headmaster closely for a reaction, or else she might have missed the way he tensed, shrinking back almost imperceptibly in his seat.

“I am aware,” he replied after a tense beat, “that Harry’s life with the Dursleys has not been ideal. But given the limited choices, I thought it preferable for him to be safe, if somewhat neglected, rather than dead.”

“Somewhat neglected?” Sue could not keep the incredulity out of her tone. “They kept him locked in a cupboard, for God’s sake. They may have stopped short of actually laying hands on him, so far anyway, but the Dursleys have abused him in every other way they could think of. Did you know? Were you even watching out for him?”

Dumbledore’s eyes burned coldly behind his spectacles, and Sue found herself quashing a flinch of her own. “I do not like the insinuation that you are making. Although I regret Harry’s unhappiness in the Dursley household, there was no other viable alternative. Without the continued protection of his mother’s blood, I doubt he would have survived to see his second birthday, let alone live long enough to claim his place at Hogwarts.”

When Sue shook her head again, Dumbledore leaned forward abruptly over his desk, shoving his teacup aside carelessly with his elbow. “Tell me, Miss Smith, what else was I to do for Harry? Do you think that the doubts you feel never crossed my own mind? What should I have done, what more _could_ I have done? I am sincerely asking, my dear, for even now, though it is far too late for second-guessing, even now I wonder if perhaps it might have been better to make a different choice, and yet…”

He dropped his gaze, folding his gnarled hands tightly together; against his blood-red desk blotter, they looked white as bone.

 “I can only think of one other option, but I can’t believe you didn’t consider it,” Sue said gently, staring at the top of the headmaster’s bent white head, waiting until he looked up at her again to continue.

“Why didn’t you adopt Harry yourself?”

Dumbledore turned away, staring out the tower window, where the pink of sunrise had disappeared and the sky had lightened to a perfect summer blue, unmarred by clouds. “That was not possible,” he said in a flat, strained voice.

“Why?”

“Please,” Sue added, when he did not answer. “I’m sorry, but I have to know.”

Dumbledore closed his eyes. The daylight streaming into the tower threw the wrinkles on his face into sharp relief. He looked impossibly old and tired.

“I considered it. When the news of what had happened to the Potters reached me, it was actually the first thought I had. But I rejected the idea. It was not my place. I believed he would be better off with his own family. I hoped, perhaps naively, that raising Harry as a son would help poor Petunia let go of her bitterness, towards her sister and towards magic as well.

“It did not occur to me that she would not come to love Harry. I could not fathom anyone not loving him. He was such a dear child, an innocent. And when it later became clear that Petunia had merely transferred her bitterness to Harry, I still felt that he was safest there, though I did take extra precautions to ensure that neither Petunia nor her husband could harm Harry physically. They did not love him, but he was secure enough, and safe from magic. I believed that was the best I could do.”

“And do you still believe that, sir? Truly? You were the only one Voldemort ever feared, isn’t that right? No Death Eater would have dared try to harm Harry with you as his guardian, and even if they had, they wouldn’t have been any match for your power. It seems to me that if you _had_ gone with your first instinct, Harry could have grown up not only safe, but also well-loved.”

Dumbledore pushed up his spectacles and rubbed at the place where they perched on his long, crooked nose. “Would it have been better?” he replied wearily, and Sue was taken aback at the sudden bitterness in his voice. “If I had taken in Harry, loved him and raised him as my own? For me, undoubtedly it would have been better, but for Harry? I am not so sure of that as you seem to be. In my experience, my love has never been enough. For anyone.”

Sue’s heart clenched. “I don’t understand, sir.”

Dumbledore readjusted his spectacles and sighed heavily. “It is a long story, and not a happy one. Suffice it to say, the last time I had someone under my care, someone innocent who depended on me, I failed. She trusted me, she loved me, but instead of protecting her, I allowed her to die. I may even have been the one to−”

He cut off with a strangled sound. Sue’s stomach dropped like a stone.

“Ariana,” she whispered, and Dumbledore covered his face with trembling hands.

“So you know. My deepest shame.” He wiped at his face slowly before meeting Sue’s eye, though tears continued to roll silently down his cheeks and into his beard. “Do you understand now? I do not fault you for mistrusting me; ever since that awful day, I have mistrusted myself. I could not allow myself to take direct responsibility for another innocent child, not after what I have done. I could not bring myself to risk the possibility that, even with the best of intentions, I might fail again. Harry had to be kept safe. Even from me.”

Sue did not know what to say, could not speak around the lump blocking her throat. She stood up and reached over the desk, taking the headmaster’s hands gently in hers. She blinked away the tears stinging at her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she choked out finally. “I had to know for sure.”

“Oh? And what is it that you now know, my dear, if I may ask?”

“That you didn’t do it on purpose, that you weren’t trying to mold him into the right kind of hero to fulfill the prophecy. That you didn’t want him to grow up unloved and alone so that he would be used to standing all on his own, never expecting help, accustomed to thinking of himself as less valuable than everyone else.”

Dumbledore looked stricken; his hands tightened almost painfully around hers. “Is that what I have done? Have I failed him so badly?”

Sue shook her head helplessly, unable to speak. Her throat felt as though it had turned to solid wood.

“It is true,” Dumbledore said slowly, “that I believe Harry has a great destiny, and that I have been planning for that day to come. I thought by keeping him at a distance, I could keep him safe and allow him to become the wizard he was meant to be, without tainting him with my influence. I wanted him to be strong enough and independent enough from me to make his own choices. Now you tell me that I have instead allowed him to be warped into a hero martyr, a willing sacrifice for wizard-kind. I swear to you that was never my intention.”

Sue stared at his pale face, noting the reddened rims of his eyes; the way he slumped against the high back of his chair; the tense, unhappy lines etched into his brow and bracketing his mouth, half-hidden behind his beard and mustache.

“It’s not too late, sir. You can undo some of the damage. All you have to do is let yourself be close to him. You already love him, that’s plain. Let him _see_ that you love him. He needs that from you, just as much as you need to give it to him. Talk to him. Explain to him why you made the choices you did, and what they mean for his life, and his future. Tell him the whole truth. He deserves to know. And I believe he will forgive you, if you allow him to.”

Dumbledore produced a florid paisley handkerchief from his sleeve and blew his long nose loudly. He patted Sue’s hand gently and gave her a watery smile.

“You make it sound so simple. But how do I tell a young boy that he was marked before birth for a task that even full-grown witches and wizards could not accomplish? I have already blighted his childhood. How can I now steal away what little innocence he has left and force him to grow up far too soon, to prepare to face a darkness no child should ever experience, let alone be expected to fight?”

“You aren’t protecting his innocence by keeping him in the dark, sir,” Sue disagreed firmly.  “Voldemort’s not going to politely wait for Harry to grow up before he goes to war against him and everything he loves. Harry already knows something sets him apart. Eventually he’s going to learn the truth, and the longer you put off explaining it, the more alienated he will become from everyone.”

Dumbledore shook his head mutely. Sue pressed harder.

“Harry _needs_ you, sir. He needs you to teach him how to come to terms with the prophecy. He needs you to show him by example how to draw strength from the love of others and let them help him. He needs someone to tell him he isn’t responsible for Voldemort’s actions, and that when people get hurt trying to protect him he _isn’t_ the one to blame. He _doesn’t_ need to be shielded from the truth until he’s so traumatized that he can’t bear the thought of letting anyone be at risk for his sake, until he feels so isolated that he thinks he has to do it all by himself.”

Dumbledore sighed. “I fear that I am the wrong person to mentor Harry in the way you describe. I myself am guilty of those same mistakes, after all. I also fear that if Voldemort has reason to believe that Harry and I are personally close, it will tempt him to try to press his advantage through Harry to get at me.”

Sue gave him a crooked smile. “You understand the way Harry feels because you’ve felt it yourself. That makes you more suited, not less. And Voldemort doesn’t need any encouragement to look for ways to harm either of you, so I wouldn’t worry about giving him more incentive. But deep down, Harry believes he isn’t worth protecting. His life is cheap to him, compared to the lives of others. Please, don’t let him get the idea that the prophecy confirms that belief. If you don’t reach out to him and let him see that he means more to you than just a weapon against Voldemort, he’ll never be able to see himself as more than that, either.”

Sue sat down heavily and finished off her tea as Dumbledore wiped his face once more. “Speaking of protecting Harry,” she added wearily as she placed her empty cup back on its saucer, “I think you ought to collect him from Privet Drive as soon as possible. He’s not doing well there, after what happened to him in the tournament. He needs to be around people who love and support him and remind him of his worth. The Dursleys are the opposite of good company for him right now.”

“A wise observation. I had intended to leave him at Privet Drive until just before the beginning of the school year. The only other place safe enough to keep him is Grimmauld Place, and I suspect that it might not be wise for him to be there, for reasons I would very much like to discuss with you, my dear.”

“Okay, sure, but hold that thought a moment. You can’t leave Harry at Privet Drive until August. Not only is it bad for his state of mind, but there’s another threat you don’t know about yet. Do you know a witch named Dolores Umbridge?”

Dumbledore frowned. “The Undersecretary to the Minister for Magic?”

“That’s the one. The Minister’s been filling her ear with complaints since June about the need to discredit Harry. In the first week of August, I’m not sure of the exact date, she’s going to get it into her head to send a pair of Dementors to Little Whinging to attack him. Harry will be able to fend off the Dementors with his Patronus, but the Ministry is going to put him on trial for using a Patronus Charm in view of a Muggle.”

“Dementors?” Dumbledore repeated, aghast. “I knew the Ministry would be a difficulty, but I had no notion that they would sink so low. Attacking a Hogwarts student with Dementors! Are you certain, Miss Smith?”

“Oh, it gets better,” Sue replied with a humorless grin. “They’re going to come up with a series of ‘Educational Decrees’ for Hogwarts. Including a new law that allows the Minister to appoint a Hogwarts professor for any open positions if the Headmaster cannot find a suitable candidate before the school year begins.”

“Let me guess, my dear,” Dumbledore sighed, rubbing his nose ruefully. “Madam Undersecretary Umbridge is only too pleased to become a part of the fine Hogwarts educational tradition.”

“You’re a very smart man, sir. What’s the possibility that you can find someone before the end of August, taking the new stakes into account? It would be good to keep that woman as far away from Harry as possible.”

“It is not looking promising,” Dumbledore admitted. “Although I have always tried to play down the rumors of a curse on the Defense position, after decades of Defense teachers prematurely departing one way or another, people do tend to take notice.”

“I bet they do,” Sue replied dryly. “Gilderoy Lockhart, really, sir?”

To her amusement, Dumbledore actually blushed slightly. “Not my best new hire, I admit. I am afraid that I may have finally scraped the bottom of the figurative barrel as far as it may be scraped.”

“Hmm. Maybe we could convince Mad-Eye Moody to have another go. Technically he never actually taught Defense at Hogwarts, so he probably counts as a new teacher, right?”

“A good thought. But we need Alastor where he is. His field and battle experience is unparalleled, and he has many valuable connections in the Ministry.”

“Fair point. Well, there’s time still. Let’s go back to the question of where Harry should stay for the rest of the summer. Why do you think it’s unwise to keep him at Number Twelve?”

Dumbledore looked at her skeptically over the rims of his spectacles. “Surely you already know, my dear? You seem to have known several of my other secrets, after all.”

Sue sighed. “I wanted to hear what you were going to say before giving you my perspective.”

Dumbledore gave her an approving smile. “And find out what information I already have before giving any of yours away. Clever.”

Sue gave him an embarrassed shrug. “We need to be careful. Don’t we?”

“Indeed. I am glad, Miss Smith, that we have advanced to ‘ _we,’_ at any rate.”

She smiled back at him, a little ruefully. “Well. Let’s say we need to work together and we need to be careful. Deal?”

“I can accept those terms. Would you prefer a formal oath, or shall we simply shake over it?” Dumbledore’s expression was innocent, but his eyes had regained their playful twinkle.

Sue smirked and offered her hand. They shook hands with mock solemnity.

“I am afraid that I have little actual information to share, my dear. I have suspicions, and I have theories, but I lack evidence to confirm them,” Dumbledore admitted while Sue settled back into her chair. “Still, what evidence I do have is suggestive, and troubles me greatly.”

Sue let out a heavy sigh. _Best to rip the bandage right off, so to speak_. “Horcruxes,” she blurted out.

Dumbledore closed his eyes. “Then it is as I feared. Many a night I have lain awake, thinking about what Tom told his followers on the night of his resurrection. _Further along the path to immortality than anyone._ I knew, when Harry brought me Tom’s diary and described the shade that had come to life from its pages, that Tom must have imbued it with a piece of his soul. I knew, too, his abhorrence of being ordinary. Any Dark wizard might create a _single_ Horcrux for himself. How many?”

Sue sighed again. “Seven.”

“Seven separate artifacts? Oh, Tom. I have never met another so gifted, and so misguided.”

“He made at least five of them before the night he went to Godric’s Hollow,” Sue continued. “But one of the seven he didn’t realize he made. Not an artifact…”

Dumbledore paled. “I see. So many Horcruxes; it is not unreasonable to think that the remains of his soul had become unstable. And there poor Harry was, a convenient vessel. It explains a great deal about the way he and Voldemort have been connected since then. But it is a blow, to have it confirmed. A terrible blow.”

Sue’s heart sank. “Then, there isn’t any other way? He has to…?”

Dumbledore’s head bowed. “If a piece of Tom Riddle’s soul has indeed attached itself to Harry, then I fear there is no way to destroy it, without also destroying Harry.”

Sue had been prepared to hear it, but it still felt like a kick in the chest. _Damn you, Voldemort. God fucking damn you to hell,_ she thought bitterly.

Abruptly, Dumbledore’s head came up. “However…”

“What?” Sue urged when the headmaster hesitated, hopeful despite herself.

“I think that Voldemort did not understand precisely what he was doing, using Harry’s blood to resurrect his own form. If he knew how closely they were already entwined, he might have thought better of entwining himself still further. It is difficult to predict the consequences with any certainty, because as far as I know no other two wizards have ever been connected in quite this way. However, it is quite possible that, should Voldemort raise his wand against Harry, he may find his own magic reacting in defense.”

Sue frowned. “You mean, Voldemort’s magic might see an attack on Harry as an attack on Voldemort, even if he’s the one doing the attacking?”

“Exactly so. Especially if Harry does not call upon his own magic for defense. If, for example, Voldemort attempted to kill Harry with magic, the bond of shared blood that allows Voldemort to touch Harry with impunity could also shield Harry from harm, yet leave the piece of Voldemort’s soul dwelling within Harry vulnerable to destruction.”

“How? When Voldemort touched him, it still hurt Harry, didn’t it?”

“Yes. But it is a double-edged sword. By taking Harry’s protection from his mother’s blood into himself, Voldemort has unwittingly made himself into another source for the protection to renew itself. In his short-sighted attempt to weaken Harry by taking away the advantage that protection gives him, he has also weakened himself by giving Harry a way to draw on Voldemort’s own magic to protect himself. But the piece of Voldemort’s soul attached to Harry would not be shielded by that same protection. Instead of rebounding upon Voldemort, the curse would fix upon that soul fragment. It would perish.”

“But only if Harry doesn’t use his own magic in response?”

“If Harry did use his magic, Voldemort’s magic might not mistake him for an extension of Voldemort. It is impossible to know how strong the blood bond is between them. It could dissolve if enough magic with intent to harm is exchanged between them.”

“What about Voldemort’s intent to harm? Wouldn’t that break the bond?”

“No, it must be mutual. If Harry casts a spell intended to harm Voldemort, Voldemort’s magic will recognize him as a threat at once. But if he only moves to block or defend, Voldemort’s own magic will flow into Harry and move to defend him against itself. Harry might not even have to consciously channel it into a response.”

Sue thought of the golden cage forming from their connected wands in the graveyard, and the bolt of golden fire erupting from Harry’s wand as it aimed itself, as if it had somehow gained a will of its own. “I think you’re right. But do you really think it will only work if Harry doesn’t know it’s happening?”

“Much in magic depends upon intent. It is possible that if Harry deliberately tries to take advantage of the bond, it may be read as hostile intent and help Voldemort’s magic to distinguish him as a separate threat to attack, instead of an extension of self to shield.”

Sue rubbed at her temples, feeling a headache threatening to form. “So that’s why,” she muttered.

“What was that, my dear?”

Sue hesitated. “Well. You told Snape−I mean, you will tell Snape, without mentioning the Horcruxes−that once they had all been destroyed, Harry would have to let Voldemort kill him, so that Voldemort himself could finally be killed. You instructed him to tell Harry once the time came.”

Dumbledore winced. “I see.”

“It’s very cruel, sending a teenage boy to his death that way. Even if you think there’s a good chance he won’t really die,” Sue couldn’t keep herself from saying. That had bothered her long after finishing the last book−that is, once her shock and grief over Snape had receded some.

Dumbledore said nothing, which made Sue respect him more than any defense he might have mustered. They were both quiet for a long moment.

“I am glad,” said the headmaster finally, quietly, “that you have come here. Even if I do not understand how, or why. I am beginning to see that I have gone too long without the correction of another informed perspective, keeping me honest, as they say.”

Sue felt herself turning red. “I just want to help.”

“And so you have already, Miss Smith, a great deal, in fact. Though I wonder.”

“Wonder what?”

Dumbledore stroked his beard thoughtfully. “Why now, my dear? If you know everything that has come before this point in time, and everything that comes after as well, why then have you arrived at _this_ particular stage of events?”

Sue felt cold all of a sudden; she suppressed a shiver. “I don’t know.”

But somewhere, deep down, Sue wondered, too.

_________________________________________________________

 

Back at Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, Sue plodded up the stairs slowly, staring blankly at her feet without seeing them. She and the headmaster had spent nearly four hours discussing Horcruxes and developing plans for retrieving them all, pausing only to eat a quick lunch.

They would begin with the locket, since it was already in their possession. Dumbledore had agreed to retrieve Harry personally at his earliest convenience and explain everything about the prophecy and the Horcruxes, so that he would be prepared to help them destroy the locket with his Parseltongue ability.

In addition, Dumbledore had agreed not to pursue any of the Horcruxes alone; Sue had insisted, though she decided to keep to herself that Gaunt’s ring was set with the Resurrection Stone, for the time being at least.

Then, they had fallen into a long and unfruitful discussion of Harry’s scar and the piece of Voldemort’s soul within. Sue had managed to convince him that the connection between the two was uneven enough that Voldemort could not use it at will to spy on the Order through Harry, but in turn Dumbledore had convinced her that there was only one possible way to destroy the piece of soul without also killing Harry. Sue hated the idea of letting Harry give himself over to Voldemort, especially if he couldn’t be told why, but she couldn’t name any viable alternatives either.

The one thing they had not talked about was how Sue had managed to transport herself to Hogwarts. Sue was relieved at the oversight, if she was honest. She felt a nameless dread whenever she thought about it, which made her only too happy to avoid thinking about it at all. 

They had also not talked about Severus, she realized, halting abruptly on the stairs. Sue was also afraid to open up that can of worms. He was no innocent like Harry, but Dumbledore had been cruel to him, too. He’d used him, was still using him. She couldn’t decide if the fact that Snape wanted to be used made things any better.

But there was no one else who could do what Snape could.

Her heart ached, her stomach felt like lead, and her brain felt like a wrung out old sponge. But when Sue reached the top floor, she forgot all about being exhausted and wanting a nap, or perhaps another good cry.

There was something very strange about the stretch of wall across from her room.

That itchy feeling was back, the one she’d had that morning when Snape had asked her to try and open the secret entrance to Dumbledore’s office. It wasn’t an itch at all, really, but that was the best word she could come up with to describe the sensation; it pulled at her like a magnet, maddening and irresistible. The more she paid attention to it, the more it pulled at her, begging her to scratch. To open.

She was just about to put her palm up against the wallpaper when Sirius’s voice startled her out of her near-hypnotized reverie.

 “You’re back, then?”

Sue glanced at him over her shoulder, but her eye was drawn back to the wall almost immediately. “Yeah,” she agreed absently, lowering her hand with an effort.

 “What’s going on? You just vanished in the middle of the night—”

“There’s something funny about this wall, Sirius,” she interrupted him. Sirius gave her an odd look.

 “How did you know?”

 Sue sighed. “It’s a long story.”

Sirius gave her a long, measuring look. Then he shrugged slightly.

 “There used to be a room right here. My Uncle Alphard, he was my mother’s brother, used to live up here. He was an odd duck. He stayed a bachelor and never had any kids of his own, but he was fond of me and my brother when we were kids, you know−used to give us candy and tell us stories, or play the piano down in the parlor with us, that sort of thing.

“But then he and my mother had an awful row one day. I think I was about ten. I don’t really know what the row was about, but I remember she and my father kicked him out of the house and then they sealed up his rooms. No one’s been in there since.”

Sue wrenched her eyes away from where she knew there must be a door and met Sirius’s eye. “Do you want it to stay sealed up?”

Sirius gave that little shrug again. “Doesn’t matter if I do or not. Whatever they did to seal it up, it seems permanent. I’ve given it a few tries over the years, but I think it would take either my mother or father to undo the spell sealing the door, and even if they weren’t both dead, they’d never unseal it.”

“I could open it,” Sue heard herself saying, as if from far away. Her eyes had gone back to the wall against her will; it took some willpower to return them to Sirius’s face.

“How?” Sirius asked, his dark brows furrowing deeply. He sounded skeptical, but not unwilling. Sue was relieved; she wasn’t sure that she could _not_ open it, now that she knew the door was there. Her heart pounding with strange, reckless excitement, Sue touched her palm to the wallpaper.

At her touch, the wallpaper melted away into nothingness, revealing the door that had been hidden there all along. Beside her, Sirius gasped; Sue quickly grasped the knob before he could think of stopping her. It turned easily in her hand. With a creaky clatter of rusted hinges, the door swung open, spilling a dusty beam of afternoon sunlight into the hall.

The maddening, itchy feeling ceased at once and Sue breathed a sigh of relief, which immediately turned into a sneeze as she accidentally breathed in some of the dust.

“How did you _do_ that?” Sirius exclaimed, almost accusingly. Sue ignored him and stepped through the door, with Sirius following close on her heels.

The room was dim, lit only by the grime-caked windows along the opposite wall. The afternoon sunlight set the dust in the air aglow. Backlit by the windows, several huge and hulking shapes swathed in dust-cloths, probably furniture, dominated the room.

Crammed in around them were many, many cardboard boxes, haphazardly stacked in piles, each covered with a thick grey layer of dust. In the corner, Sue noticed a narrow, decidedly wobbly-looking cot pushed up against the wall, made up neatly with a dusty blanket and pillow. More cardboard boxes huddled in the space beneath it.

Squinting in the dimness, she stepped closer to the nearest pile of boxes, trying to read the writing scrawled in a shaky, spiky hand on the sides.

“What is all this stuff?” she wondered aloud.

“No idea,” Sirius said, looking around in mild bewilderment. He sneezed twice abruptly.

“Bless you,” Sue said absently as she wiped dust off of the top box in the stack she was examining. Even with the dust cleared off, she couldn’t decipher the writing.

Behind her, she heard a muffled whump. Sue turned to see Sirius tugging the dust cover off of the nearest object, sending up a huge cloud of dust. Together, they both stood and gaped at what he had uncovered.

“I think I know why my mum and dad kicked Uncle Alphie out,” Sirius muttered.

There before them, dust swirling madly around its dark black screen that bulged like a huge glass eye, was an enormous old-fashioned television set.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I'm still not entirely happy with this one, but here it is. Sorry for the long wait. I hope to get the next chapter written and posted soon, since I have it mostly plotted out, but I am working more hours and I may be starting a new job soon, so it may be a while again. At least the next chapter will have a lot more Snape in it ;D
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	10. Things Broken and Things Mended

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long time no update. This chapter has been more or less written for a long time, but still gave me a lot of trouble. The story is taking its own shape now and I wasn't prepared for that shape at all. 
> 
> Things are about to get dark. This chapter in particular contains scenes of torture and violence, so please consider yourself warned.
> 
> Also, please keep in mind that thoughts/views of the characters are not necessarily shared by the author--nor are they in any way being endorsed as healthy.
> 
> Hopefully it won't take so long to get the next chapter uploaded.

 Chapter 10 – Things Broken and Things Mended

 

_Strumming my pain with his fingers,_

_Singing my life with his words,_

_Killing me softly with his song,_

_Killing me softly with his song,_

_Telling my whole life with his words,_

_Killing me softly_

_With his song._

− Fugees, _Killing Me Softly_

 

_The sand is cool against his hot face._

_“My Lord. Please kill me. My Lord.”_

They were gathered in the largest underground chamber, which had previously been used as a wine cellar, judging by the pungent smell of wine gone to vinegar. The smell still lingered, but everything else that one might expect to find in a wine cellar had been cleared out completely, leaving the stone walls and floor bare. The loosely-packed circle of cloaked figures, faces hidden behind skeletal masks that gleamed in the eldritch light cast by their collective wands, each tilted their heads with attentive deference toward the unnaturally pale, tall and thin figure that stood in their midst.

Severus could feel sweat beading under his own hastily conjured mask, although the air was chilly in the cellars beneath the late Igor Karkaroff’s castle. It stuck out like a crenellated wart against the flat, frozen tundra Karkaroff had inexplicably elected to build it upon, visible for miles and miles in every direction. This isolation was part of the reason it still stood empty, making a convenient temporary headquarters for the Dark Lord and his Death Eaters.

He had made his way through the perimeter barrier and down the secret tunnel entrance as quickly as he could without actually breaking into a run, knowing that it did not matter but powerless to resist the urge for haste.

It had been exactly a week since the last summons. Either he had been given time to recover, or time to anticipate fresh horrors. He had very little confidence in where he stood currently with their resurrected master; he knew for certain that he had no allies among his fellow servants. Even Lucius would not risk making the slightest gesture towards helping him now, no matter how many favors he owed Severus.

_Sand coats his cheeks, wet with tears and snot; grains cling to his lips and tongue; it falls in clumps from his wet eyelashes and stings his eyes horribly. He has no saliva left to spit out the grit in his mouth, but at some point he bit through his tongue, drawing enough blood to wet his mouth and speak._

_“Please, my Lord. Kill me. Kill me.”_

The Dark Lord must have gathered everyone else first, before summoning Severus. That meant he was here not just to report, but also to be humiliated in some way before the others. Perhaps this would be the last time; perhaps he would be able to earn a reprieve, even improve his standing. He refused to consider the possibility of ending up even lower.

Almost all of the loyal Death Eaters still alive, except for those in Azkaban, were present, he noted as he crossed the threshold. Severus counted only two missing. Jugson and Gibbon must still be out hunting down the last of the Dark Lord’s servants who failed to return to him. Assuming, of course, there were no Death Eaters that Severus did not know about.

And they were all waiting to hear him speak. Almost exactly the way they had waited that night, fifteen years ago, when he had opened the door to the Lestranges’ drawing room with shaking hands, when he had knelt with rubbery legs on their expensive rug, woven from braided veela hair of all things, and knowingly committed murder with his words.

Of his own free will, he’d sacrificed a mother and child to save his own worthless, cowardly skin for one more turn of the moon. If there was a God, like the one his father used to rave about when he was drunk and feeling righteously martyred, Severus thought that He or She would have surely struck him dead before he’d spoken. That would have been the act of a just creator.

Instead, Severus was alive, Lily was dead, and justice, like divine intervention, had so far failed to make an appearance.

He strode without haste and without hesitation through the figures, who parted like smoke to let him pass into the center of the room. Severus slipped off his mask without needing to be told and dropped smoothly to his knees. He bowed his head and arranged his arms wrists-up on his thighs—adopting, without needing to think, a familiar, appallingly comfortable pose of supplication.

He heard the rustle of robes approaching. Severus closed his eyes, bowed his head lower, and cleared his mind of all distraction. No matter what transpired, he had to keep his mind clear.

Otherwise, he would never survive to do what must be done.

Severus felt cloth brush against his knees. Blindly, he bent forward until his nose was almost touching the ground. He groped with his fingertips for the hem of the robes and pressed the rough wool to his lips.

“My Lord,” he murmured fervently into the cloth. He kissed it again.

Suddenly, there was a loud snap. Severus knew what it signified and immediately straightened. Fingers gripped his chin. Severus quickly opened his eyes and looked up, suppressing his desire to shudder. The hands were bad enough—with their unnatural pallor and long, spindly fingers, they looked like nothing so much as huge, pale spiders—but the face bent over him now was worse. Its eyes found his, and even if it were permitted, Severus could not have looked away. He was instantly in thrall, like a bird hypnotized by a snake.

He hardly dared even to blink; so far as he could tell, the Dark Lord no longer needed to.

He would be devoured. Part of him welcomed this.

Severus felt his mind being breached, a familiar spike of ice sliding effortlessly into his brain. It did not hurt, exactly. He did not struggle.

“Tell me, Severus. Why do you kneel?” the monster breathed softly. Its flat, red eyes filled Severus’s vision. He could see his own reflection in each of them, warped and stretched; eyes turned into black, vacant holes, pale skin tinted red, like a man drowned in a lake of blood.

Severus’s lips felt dry. He heard the rustling of robes from the circle around him, the faint sound of their collective breathing through the macabre masks they wore, the pounding of his own blood rushing in his veins. Terror coiled queasily in the pit of his stomach. He knew his fear was obvious to the thing relentlessly penetrating his mind and hoped that it would appease rather than anger it, as an acceptable display of his weakness.

He also hoped that he would not be sick, or piss himself. Those would not be acceptable displays of weakness.

The idea that he might very well die down here in the cellars of Igor _bloody_ Karkaroff’s tacky _nouveau riche_ castle struck Severus suddenly as unbearably hilarious.

_At least I won’t die freezing in a shack like that weak-chinned idiot,_ he thought spitefully _. For Merlin’s sake._ Even Severus, who grew up in a drafty weatherboard hovel with perpetually peeling paint, knew that living in any castle that had not been in the family for six generations at least was terribly gauche.

Severus wondered if dying in a reproduction castle was also gauche. To his horror, he nearly snickered out loud. The near-miss only made it seem funnier, and for a moment hysteria bubbled uncontrollably inside him, threatening to boil over; fortunately, his throat had conveniently turned itself into a block of wood, and neither inappropriate laughter nor nervous ejections could pass through it.

_Please, my Lord. Let me die. Please._

Severus was aware that he was panicking, and on the verge of losing control of himself entirely, but he was also somehow apart from the feeling, as if it were another person panicking, while he was merely a calm observer. The dissociation gave him just enough presence of mind to avoid causing a scene. The exercises that he had practiced until they had become second nature came back to him; he visualized his panic, reached out and gripped it firmly, keeping it from taking over. He tried in vain to soothe it, wrestle it into submission and make his mind clear once more, but it stubbornly refused to subside.  

The Dark Lord looked on, obviously aware and amused by Severus’s struggling. He would not remain patient for long. Severus tried again to clear his mind, but his control was rapidly slipping away. _Be calm_. _Think_.

It was too late to escape, he reminded himself, and for some reason, this helped. He took a deep, measured breath and focused on slowing his racing pulse.

It had always been too late, really. Panic would not save him. He was already trapped in the red. He had never really left it, and it would never leave him.

_There is nothing to fear,_ he thought. _There is nothing left. There is nothing._

The wood block of his throat melted back into flesh. His thoughts were suddenly very clear, and perfectly calm. _Why do I kneel?_

The panicky, terrified part of him drained rapidly away from his conscious mind, as if it had suddenly remembered the role that was intended for it. His mind splintered into fractions, and the largest fraction, logical and calm and free of distracting emotion, rose dominant. The split was so clean and even, Severus hardly felt that his mind was fractured. Indeed, he no longer felt anything at all.

“Because I wish to serve,” Severus finally replied. 

The slits in the creature’s face that served for nostrils flared; Severus felt its pleasure at his response.  

The Dark Lord had been greatly changed by his resurrection, but in many ways he was still the same, and if there was one thing Severus understood, it was the necessity of submission. He understood it, and even though it filled him with revulsion and self-loathing, he had discovered that it also made something within him unwind. Afterward, he would fall into a state of overwhelming tranquility that sometimes lasted for hours.  When it inevitably faded, the self-disgust would return tenfold, pushing him into a black depression that sometimes lasted for days.

Now he hoped to use it to keep himself alive, at least for long enough to either earn the lasting trust of the soulless lunatic he called master, or to discover a viable way to kill him and make him stay dead permanently.

“And why do you wish to serve?”

The invader in his thoughts pressed deeper, seeking blindly. Severus resisted the urge to shrink away. He opened himself as wide as he could, embracing the redness that crept once more over his mind. He showed it what it wanted to find without reservation. His hatred and bitterness and petty envy; his lust for power, respect, control. His shameful craving for humiliation; his furtive desire to be subjugated and controlled by power and strength greater than his own. His disgust with his many weaknesses and his lack of accomplishments. His fear, primarily of the thing that held him in his grasp, reaching inside of him like a possessing spirit and claiming all that it touched. His awe in the face of its terrible, all-consuming power. The terrible compulsion he felt even now in the face of that power, to surrender all illusions of identity and control and let it remake him from scratch.

He wanted to feel that power use him up until he disappeared completely. He wanted to be erased by it until nothing of him remained, not even a single stray feeling or memory.

The feelings he showed to the red no longer belonged to him. They meant nothing. He felt nothing. He _was_ nothing. He allowed everything inside him to bend under the power of the red, giving himself up to it in complete surrender. Finally empty of feeling, empty of his own pathetically inferior will, merely a vessel for the stronger, better will of the power that filled him and commanded him.

“Because you are my Lord,” he heard his voice answer. That was good.

The most frightening thing was how easy it was. He was so light without the weight of his own will to hold him down, absolved of the responsibility to choose, to control, even to remember. He dimly sensed the familiar, yet potent mixture of relief and shame that came with this freedom, and he let his master have that, too. He was nothing, therefore he had nothing to keep, nothing to hide.

The Dark Lord smiled and withdrew from Severus’s mind. He removed those loathsome fingers from Severus’s chin and slowly straightened back up to his full height.

“You may rise. What is your report?”

Severus rose to his feet with deliberate slowness and smoothed his robes, projecting calm unhurriedness. He felt the eyes of all the other Death Eaters upon him like a clammy hand, but he kept his eyes locked with his master’s.

“The Order of the Phoenix has officially reformed, my Lord. They have established a new headquarters, protected by the Fidelius Charm. Dumbledore himself is the Secret Keeper. He does not confide in me completely, but I do not believe that he suspects my true allegiance.”

“He believes that you are _reformed._ He always was foolish that way,” the Dark Lord drawled, his slit of a mouth twisting itself into a chilling mockery of a smile. On cue, the other Death Eaters gathered around them chuckled, though to Severus’s ear they sounded a bit mechanical. Severus gave his own thin smile.

“Yes, my Lord. He is blinded by his own weakness. All I need do is reflect his own guilt back to him, and he is convinced of my loyalty.”

“And what have you learned while playing mirror, Severus? What can you tell us of the Order’s preparations?”

With a casual flick of his wand, the Dark Lord conjured a massive throne of carved ebony for himself, never taking his eyes off of Severus’s. Even seated, he was a full head taller than the tallest of the wizards assembled. Without needing to be told, they all shifted silently into a double semi-circle behind Severus, so that the Dark Lord could see them all without turning his head.

“The Order is focusing most of its effort on raising opposition against us within the Wizarding community. But they are hampered by the Ministry and cannot move openly. Although Dumbledore is still trustworthy in the eyes of many, reports of your return are largely discredited in the public eye, and Dumbledore has lost a considerable amount of his vaunted influence and respect within the Wizarding community as a result. His old tactic of using his reputation to shield Order members has been rendered useless. All the Order members must now take care to hide any connection they have to Dumbledore, or risk retaliation from the Ministry.”

“We owe a great debt to Minister Fudge,” the Dark Lord observed dryly, giving an approving nod to one of the masked wizards behind Severus. All the Death Eaters were well aware that Lucius had been very busy the past few weeks, using his considerable influence over the Minister for Magic to great effect. Lucius had been seen often around the Ministry and in the company of Fudge, bending his ear, keeping his paranoia against Dumbledore well stoked, convincing him to put pressure on the Wizengamot to demote him, and even providing him with the gold to bribe the International Confederation to vote him out of office, if rumor could be trusted.

“The Order is having difficulty recruiting new members as well,” Severus continued without inflection. “There are less than twenty witches and wizards who have taken the oath, and many of them lack experience and influence. Dumbledore has sent emissaries to the giants and the goblins, but the goblins wish to remain neutral. The emissaries to the giants are still en route.”

“When they arrive, they shall find little support. I sent Macnair and Avery to make sure of that,” the Dark Lord replied, running his spider-fingers up and down the carved snakes decorating the arms of his throne. “But all you have told me are things that I had already guessed, or that I could easily learn from another source. _Less than twenty_ following Dumbledore, Severus? Do you not have an exact number to give me? Names?”

Severus said nothing.

The Dark Lord made a _tsk_ sound. He leaned forward slowly, pinning Severus with his gaze. The wizards behind him were all holding their breath, he knew; their avid terror and anticipation was so thick in the air Severus could taste it. It lay thick on his tongue, sour and coppery, as if he had swallowed blood.

“I am disappointed in your efforts, Severus. I expected you to bring me some _new_ information. Unless there is something that prevents you? Something you wish to _confess_?”

The last word ended in a drawn-out hiss. His empty eyes bored into Severus’s. _They really do look like blood,_ he thought inanely. The piece of his mind now possessed by his terror yammered and gibbered below the surface of his conscious thoughts, but it held its place and did not waver. He pulled his relief and his dread in as close as he could, wrapped himself in them like a blanket, and let his mind be taken again.

The Dark Lord ripped into his thoughts like a spoiled child tearing into a package. This time it did hurt, but Severus made no move to protect himself. His bowed head rocked back; dimly he felt a trickle of blood run down his upper lip.

_It doesn’t matter. I am nothing._

Scattered thoughts and memories and confused, disjointed flashes of emotion flickered rapidly in his mind’s eye. The red eyes swallowed him whole and seeped inside him, filling up his mind like rising water. The red was everywhere and saw everything. It was all meaningless to Severus. He had mostly ceased to exist.

Yet even as he lost himself completely to the will of the presence invading his mind, Severus knew that there was one place inside of him that the red avoided. It shrank away from the ball of abject terror tucked just below his conscious mind whenever it brushed against it, and did not attempt to pierce its quaking shell and look within.

It went on this way for an eternity, or possibly half a minute. Time was meaningless when one was nothing. Then the Dark Lord withdrew and Severus’s mind was his own once more. It was blissfully quiet and still in there, like a pond that had never even known a ripple.

At some point, he had gone down on his knees again, and he thought it would be pleasant to stay there awhile and simply exist in peace, but he had work to do. Time to make use of his calm and clarity while he had it.

“My Lord, I beg for your forgiveness,” he heard himself say. His voice was a little hoarse, but he was pleased at how composed he sounded, and that the right words seemed to all be there waiting to be spoken in order, without the need for conscious thought on his part.

“I am loyal only to you, but I have failed you and I am unworthy, my Lord. Dumbledore does not wish me to know the identity of everyone who serves him and has taken care to keep me ignorant. I can name many of the Order members, however, and name more that I suspect may also be involved. I cannot be certain of the exact number, my Lord, but there are only a dozen witches and wizards that I know of actively helping the Order.”

“Then name them. Now.”

Severus did. The names flowed from his tongue like water. The Dark Lord listened without looking at Severus, instead keeping his eye on the others assembled, presumably to see if any had any visible reaction to the names. Severus was unconcerned. He knew he was the only Order spy. However, the piece of his mind that he had put in charge of collecting intelligence observed that this likely meant that the Dark Lord’s suspicion was no longer focused on himself, at least for now.

And the names of the Order and its supporters were less valuable than they seemed. Dumbledore had instructed Severus to spill them at his earliest convenience, taking care to appear neither too eager nor too hesitant.

Somehow, Fudge had gotten his pudgy hands on a disturbingly accurate list of names of suspected “associates” of Dumbledore. It was only a matter of time before it found its way into Lucius’s hands. The only way to salvage any advantage from this turn of events was to make sure that the information leak was credited to Severus instead, to bolster his position while maintaining minimal repercussions for the Order.

Severus had no choice but to identify all the Order members from the first war by name, but of the new members and Order sympathizers he named only the ones who also stood a fighting chance defending themselves against assassination attempts. The alacrity with which they were able to send their families into hiding would hopefully be chalked up to the lessons learned from the first war. Lucius would gain little from bringing the information to the Dark Lord now, which hopefully would deter him from obtaining it. And if the list did turn up later, any discrepancies with what Severus had told them would be explained by Dumbledore’s established habit of strict information control.

Severus was thinking that he had managed quite well when the Dark Lord suddenly snapped his fingers again. Severus rose to his feet immediately, keeping his head lowered.

“My Lord.”

“You have not been quite as useless as I feared, Severus. But still not useful enough. What else do you have to tell me? I know Dumbledore is planning more than merely exposing me. I must discover what he is thinking.”

“Yes, my Lord. Dumbledore also seeks to anticipate your next move. He struggles with grasping your motives, but he has concluded that you will attempt to retrieve the full record of Trelawney’s prophecy concerning yourself and the Potter boy. He hopes to use this as a way to lure you into showing yourself.”

“If he were willing to use the boy as bait, he might have something of a clever plan there. Terribly transparent, but still, worth the calculated risk if I could outsmart him, and he would know that.” The Dark Lord spoke aloud, addressing no one. Severus had an idea that for the Dark Lord, the only real conversations he ever had were with himself, because he was the only person that he truly believed existed.

“It matters little, I suppose,” declared the Dark Lord after a moment. “As usual, I have a plan that is several steps ahead of the old fool. All I need is the right opportunity to put it in action. And the right tools, of course.”

“Yes, my Lord,” Severus agreed without concern, though he had no idea what he meant. The piece of his mind that was responsible for filing away these clues for Dumbledore did its duty. Severus did not need to do anything except listen and answer correctly. He waited calmly for his master’s next question.

Instead, the Dark Lord raised his voice to address the entire room. “That reminds me. While I have you all here, I have some welcome news for us all to share. Gibbon and Jugson are returned to us, and they have completed their mission. The last of the traitors has been dealt with. Gibbon and Jugson will be rewarded well for their loyalty and attention to duty.”

The Death Eaters sent up a murmur. It sounded approving, but there was a distinct note of cold jealousy discernible to the trained ear. Jugson and Gibbon would do well to keep a wary eye out for hexes from behind, Severus thought idly. The piece of his mind still listening for intelligence carefully noted that this information agreed with his mental tally of Death Eaters.

“You too have done well, Severus,” continued the Dark Lord softly, almost sounding kind. He stroked Severus’s hair. Severus remained still and accepted the caress. “Shall I give you a reward also?”

All the Death Eaters listened eagerly for his response. Severus’s mouth spoke of its own accord. “I do not deserve a reward, my Lord. I am weak and I disappointed you.”

The Dark Lord stroked his hair once more, then he seized a lock and pulled it sharply, ripping several strands out by the root. Severus had no reaction to either touch; he bore them silently.

“Do you wish me to punish you?”

Severus felt a twinge of self-loathing, but he answered truthfully and without hesitation. “Yes, my Lord.”

It was the right answer, he knew; still, he loathed himself for being eager for it regardless of whether it made him seem more loyal or not.

“Very well, my son,” the Dark Lord said in that same kind tone. He lifted his wand.

Severus was never prepared for that first wave of pain. It seemed that no matter how short of a time it had been between sessions of _Cruciatus_ , his brain always managed to forget just how intense the jolts of agony crackling through his nerves would be.

But his body remembered. The painful muscle spasms that followed each casting came faster each time the curse was used on him. Eventually, he knew, he would feel the spasms before the curse was even cast, from the threat of the raised wand alone. It was actually a very interesting physiological and psychological phenomenon, the calm part of his mind mused from within the quiet space carved out in his head, even as the rest of him writhed and bucked on the floor, fingers clawing at the stone, while the others watched him silently from behind their masks.

Severus ignored his own hoarse screams from within his quiet space, thinking vaguely about ways that he might combine a treatment for phantom limb pain with a standard potion for _Cruciatus_ after-effects. It would have a very limited marketability, though. His fellow Death Eaters were the most likely to benefit from such an experiment, but it wasn’t as if he could go around handing out potions to them, like some kind of fucked-up Florence Nightingale.

  _Just call me Dr. Feelgood_ , he thought, and hoped that no one recognized his screaming for the laughter it really was.

Any amount of time was a long time under the _Cruciatus_ curse. However, this time the Dark Lord lifted his wand after a much shorter span of time than Severus was accustomed to, even before last week.

“I think that will suffice,” the Dark Lord said quietly, with the air of an indulgent uncle, as he lowered his wand. The agony coursing through every nerve in Severus’s body suddenly ceased, although his muscles still twitched and jumped painfully. He found himself curled tightly into a ball on the floor, feeling a little bemused by how deeply he had withdrawn into himself this time. Perhaps he was getting better with practice. Still, he hoped there would be no more opportunities for him to improve further, at least for a while. Comparing this session to last week’s seaside trip, it seemed to Severus that it had been more of a show for the benefit of the other Death Eaters than a real test for him.

“On your knees, dear Severus. Turn and face your brothers in arms,” the Dark Lord said coldly. Severus clawed himself upright, his limbs still twitching rebelliously, and knelt facing the others. They all stood still as statues, as if afraid that the slightest move could prompt their master to replace Severus with one of them and continue the festivities anew. The only things that marked them as still living were the glittering eyes behind their skull masks, watching him.

The Dark Lord put a gentle hand on his shoulder. His next words confirmed Severus’s suspicions.

“Look at your brother Severus. See how calmly, how serenely he bears his punishment. He knows it was deserved, and he did not shirk it. Observe how willingly he submits before his master. He trusts me completely. Don’t you, Severus?”

“Yes, my Lord,” Severus replied dutifully, although his voice refused to go above a hoarse whisper. _One day I will dance on your grave_ , he did not say. It would be briefly entertaining to see the look on the Dark Lord’s face, but a terrible waste of all his quite painful efforts to survive up to now.

He licked his lips and found that he had bitten the bottom one nearly all the way through. If he wasn’t careful, that would scar, and such a scar would be difficult to explain. He warned himself sternly to remember to take care of it later.

 “You can learn much from Severus’s example,” the Dark Lord addressed the masked Death Eaters. “If even one as tainted by mistakes and betrayals as he can apply himself so diligently to earning back his Lord’s trust and respect, then none of you can have any excuse for not doing the same. Severus has shown you the way. Remember it. Give me your unquestioning obedience, give me your will, give me your very life, and I will repay you with all the glory and respect and power that you could possibly desire.”

The other Death Eaters shifted and muttered. Severus knew that the praise would only harden them all against him even more, and he knew that the Dark Lord also knew this. He wanted him isolated. Severus would need to discreetly find out why.

The Dark Lord bent down to whisper in his ear. “I am impressed, my son. I have never seen anyone endure what you have in so short a period of time without breaking. From now on, you will be in my inner circle. Do not falter, Severus, and everything you desire will soon be yours.”

Severus smiled widely, not caring about the sting it provoked in his bitten lip.

_I shall soon have everything I desire._

“Thank you, my Lord,” he whispered back. “You honor me beyond all expectation. I live to serve you always.”

The Dark Lord gave his shoulder an almost affectionate squeeze, and Severus grinned even wider, as all the Death Eaters clapped for him. Their arms moved in the false, jerky manner of marionettes.

_After I dance on your grave, I’m going to piss on it. And if I have any in me, I’ll take a steaming shit over you too, you evil bastard._

For the first time since the Mark had begun to darken, Severus thought that he might actually be feeling happy.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Later, alone in his quarters, Severus curled up fully-dressed on the floor of his tub, under the hottest water he could stand, and slowly re-merged the fractions of his mind. For some reason, the hot water seemed to help. Still, it took longer and longer each time, and Severus wondered if there might soon come a day when he could no longer piece his mind back together again.

He had always understood Occlumency to be fundamentally an exercise in both mental fortitude and resolute self-deception, but the applications that Severus had painstakingly developed were, as far as his research had uncovered, completely unprecedented, and probably incredibly dangerous. So far he had remained entirely functional while in his fractured state of consciousness−though a bit lacking in emotive response−but remaining in that state for too long would undoubtedly have consequences. It might drive him completely mad. But it had succeeded beyond all expectation. Severus thought he might already be in the clear with the Dark Lord, so to speak, far earlier than even his most optimistic estimates.

Last week, the Dark Lord had summoned him, alone, to a deserted strip of beach along a desolate outcropping of shoreline, inaccessible except by apparition, and tortured him repeatedly, until Severus had lost count of how many rounds he had endured, until he was hard-pressed to even remember his own name, let alone maintain any deception about his true allegiance. He had been certain that the Dark Lord intended to kill him as soon as he had arrived; by the end, he was shamelessly begging him to do it.

_“Please, my Lord,”_ he had gasped, face down against the stony, coarse sand, unable to lift his head to look at his master. “ _My Lord. Please kill me. My Lord.”_

The Dark Lord ignored all his pleas for death. After each bout of _Cruciatus_ , the Dark Lord had held his head immobile—Severus had rapidly lost the ability to hold it up himself, although he genuinely tried when the Dark Lord ordered him to—and thoroughly combed through Severus’s mind, methodically sifting and sorting through everything he found there, again and again and again. By then, Severus had lost all sense of what was happening and could no longer concentrate enough to Occlude. Yet his mind remained fractured, and the Dark Lord never sensed the fracturing, nor detected the pieces hiding behind the larger whole.

Severus was at a loss to explain how, or why, but when the Dark Lord finally left him, abandoning him where he lay on the beach, and it dawned upon him that he was not about to be killed after all, Severus decided he didn’t need to understand this unexpected blindness. Its usefulness had been proven beyond doubt.

It was only sheer luck that Severus had discovered the trick that had fooled the Dark Lord so well. Severus was a skilled Occlumens, and he had continued to practice almost every day for the last fifteen years. But that night of the Triwizard Tournament, when faced with the Dark Lord resurrected for the first time, remembering all too well the deft skill he had once possessed and knowing full well that he was really no match for the Dark Lord whatsoever, Severus had panicked and done the only thing he could think of: he seized all the thoughts and feelings that he couldn’t allow to be discovered into a tight ball. Then he threw his terror over that and tried to push it deep below his conscious mind, just like a child cleaning his room by throwing a sheet over the mess and shoving it all under his bed. In his desperation, he managed to sever that part of himself from the rest of his consciousness entirely. As far as the main part of Severus was concerned, the thoughts and feelings hidden in the smaller piece still existed and he could recall them in perfect clarity, but they did not belong to Severus or have any emotional effect on the rest of him.

Severus had been sure that he was doomed, and took comfort from the fact that at least he failed before he’d had the chance to possess any really sensitive information that the Dark Lord could use. Yet, miraculously, the Dark Lord did not even give his poorly-hidden incriminating thoughts and memories a first glance, let alone try to penetrate the shifting mass of terror Severus had created by fracturing his consciousness. At first Severus thought perhaps the larger portion of his consciousness had masked the smaller somehow, like a barrier. Yet somehow, even last week, when the Dark Lord seemed to have made every effort to take Severus’s mind completely apart, the deception still held. Severus thought perhaps that without the emotional connection between the smaller piece and the larger piece, there was no path through Severus’s consciousness that the Dark Lord could follow down to his disloyal thoughts and incriminating memories.

It should never have worked, and if he had tried such a thing against the Dark Lord’s former Legilimency skills, he would have been found out at once. But Severus had been summoned a total of four times since the Dark Lord’s return, and he had quickly discovered that the Dark Lord practiced Legilimency far differently now from the way he had done it before his original body was destroyed. Back then, he had been like a surgeon, slicing through any resistance so neatly that there was no time to feel any pain, barely time to even feel the intrusion as he cut unerringly through everything irrelevant, direct to the information he wanted.

Now, the Dark Lord seemed to have abandoned all of his former finesse in favor of a brute-force blitz assault, stabbing into the mind of his victim like a blunt chisel, violently overwhelming the mind’s defenses and then digging about blindly, almost at random, until he located anything that could lead him by association to whatever he wanted to know. And, apart from hate and anger and shame, anything too emotional seemed to repulse him so completely that he could hardly stand to examine it at any length.

After that first time, Severus experimented with fracturing his mind into multiple pieces, compartmentalizing different emotions and aspects of his consciousness within each, keeping the dominant portion of his consciousness free of anything that could be interpreted as disloyal. It had the added benefit of making it much easier to submit totally to the Dark Lord’s will, which seemed to have made a favorable impression.

The Dark Lord did seem to be at least partially aware of this new weakness, but he seemed to have no idea how to correct it, or how deeply it really went. More importantly, the Dark Lord seemed to have no idea what Severus had done, or what he was hiding, and apparently he had come to the conclusion that Severus was completely loyal after all.

When his hands had stopped trembling and his mind felt back to normal, more or less, Severus shut off the steaming water and climbed slowly to his feet. He dried his clothes and hair with a quick charm and checked his reflection in the mirror. He looked well enough, or no worse than usual, anyway.

Now that he had secured his position with the Dark Lord, he could devote himself completely to solving the mystery of the girl. Woman. Sue. One way or another, he would discover her secrets.

Time to pay a visit to Grimmauld Place.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

In addition to the ancient television set, Sue and Sirius uncovered the following in Alphard Black’s old room:

An Electrolux vacuum, circa 1960, with its plug neatly snipped off;

three electric can openers, also with the plugs removed;

several pairs of old-fashioned metal skates, complete with skate keys for adjusting them to fit;

a typewriter with all its keys removed and saved in a paper bag taped to the back of it;

and a huge vintage phonograph, complete with enormous brass horn and heavy hand crank.

As they opened the boxes, they found a similarly eclectic collection of items. Many of the boxes were filled with old pulp paperbacks and magazines, the pages crumbling with age. Other boxes contained an astonishingly large collection of vintage vinyl records−10-inch and 12-inch LPs and 7-inch 45s. One box contained, inexplicably, nothing but old-fashioned aluminum pull tabs, the kind that opened soda cans back in the sixties. Another box was stuffed with electric Christmas lights, hopelessly tangled together.

“I can’t believe all this stuff has been here this whole time,” Sirius said, voice muffled. He had squeezed behind a section of boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling to see what was behind them. “Why hide it all away? Why didn’t they just get rid of it all?”

“I don’t know,” Sue replied distractedly as she examined the phonograph. Its tone arm appeared to have been modified to hold a needle that could play vinyl records, instead of the usual steel needle for playing old 78 RPMs. That would explain all the boxes filled with records. Would it still play? “Maybe they just wanted to forget it was here.”

“Or maybe they weren’t the ones who sealed up the room. I always assumed they had, because they refused to speak about it. But maybe it was Uncle Alphie who sealed the door, so that they couldn’t destroy his collection.

“Ah!” Sirius exclaimed suddenly. He shuffled out from behind the boxes with something large cradled in his arms. “Look what I found!”

At the sight of the black guitar case, Sue’s stomach swooped oddly. Once he was clear of the stacked boxes, Sirius unsnapped the case and drew out an old Martin acoustic guitar by its neck. The honey-colored wood gleamed in the fading sunlight.

“Do you play?” Sue asked, trying to sound unaffected.

Sirius snorted. “A long time ago I played, badly. Mostly to pick up girls, to be honest. Do you?” he asked, looking at her too closely for Sue’s comfort.

She shrugged as casually as she could. “I used to. I haven’t in a long time.”

“Any good?”

“Some people thought so.” Her father had loved to hear her play. And sing. When he was gone, the music in her died.

Sirius held out the guitar. “Come on then! Let’s hear you.”

Sue’s hands accepted the instrument, her refusal dying on her lips. Her fingers plucked the strings experimentally and twisted the tuning pegs until the sound was true, motions so familiar she hardly needed to think about them.

It was a fine instrument, well made, and it felt right in her hands. Perhaps the music was not dead, after all. Perhaps it had just been waiting. Waiting for her to let herself live again.

Her fingers moved into place as if they had never left, and the opening chords of her father’s old favorite came effortlessly forth. When it was time, she began to sing without thinking:

_“So, so you think you can tell_

_Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain._

_Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?_

_A smile from a veil?_

_Do you think you can tell?_

_Did they get you to trade?_

_Your heroes for ghosts?_

_Hot ashes for trees?_

_Hot air for a cool breeze?_

_Cold comfort for change?_

_Did you exchange,_

_A walk-on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage?_

_How I wish, how I wish you were here._

_We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,_

_Running over the same old ground._

_What have we found?_

_The same old fears._

_Wish you were here.”_

The sun was setting now, leaving the room dim and gloomy. The last chord echoed between them. Sue carefully leaned the guitar against a nearby stack of boxes, so she could wipe her face. Sirius coughed and swiped at his own eyes furtively.

“That was…beautiful,” he said, a little hoarsely.

“Thank you,” she whispered. She handed the guitar back. He put it back into its case and offered the handle to her.

“You should keep it. A good instrument deserves a good musician.”

Sue took the case, unable to speak. She felt as if something heavy had been lifted from her, a weight she hadn’t even felt until she had let it go.

“Come on,” Sirius said with a false heartiness. “I’m starving. Let’s see what Molly has planned for dinner. Afterward we can bring Arthur up and show him, he’ll love all this.”

Sue followed him downstairs in a daze, cradling the guitar case close.

It had been a mistake to give up music, she now understood. It hurt to play again, but it was a good hurt; the kind of hurt that comes with draining an abscess, discharging something poisonous and cleaning infection from the wound.

The kind of hurt that heals.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------

When he heard the music stop, Severus backed swiftly away from the door and slipped back down the stairs on legs that felt as heavy as lead. He might not have learned to stop listening at doors, but he had, at least, learned not to get caught doing it.

He wished that he had not listened. The girl’s voice was agonizing in its beauty, worming its way into his heart and piercing him straight through, like an insect on a collector’s pin. She was a siren−sweetly, sadly singing him to his doom.

“Would you like to stay for dinner, Severus?” Molly Weasley called to him from the kitchen steps, but he swept past without looking, without pausing, desperate to escape before the girl could come downstairs; before she could stare right through him with her wide, fey eyes and see how completely she had confounded him.

He flung himself out into the growing twilight and Disapparated.


	11. Deepest Fears

### Chapter 11: Deepest Fears

 

_Now you’ve sunk so low, there’s no more depth to fall,_

_but the gift of youth will soon betray us all._

_Fly low you carrion crow_

_and seize my body for to free my soul._

_I don’t deny what I can’t control,_

_for the things I’ve done no one else should know._

\- Two Gallants, _Fly Low Carrion Crow_

When Sue finally awoke the next day, the sun was already high in the sky. She had not had any dreams, good or bad, that she could remember. After dinner, which Sue hardly saw or tasted in her tired distraction, she had excused herself and gone straight to bed without even changing out of the robes she’d borrowed from Snape.

            _Snape,_ she thought as she sat up slowly and ran her hands over the black cloth. He’d never returned after leaving Dumbledore’s office. She had been sure that he would be waiting as soon as she and Dumbledore were finished, but instead Dumbledore had ended up apparating her back to Grimmauld Place himself. Had something happened? Had he been summoned by Voldemort?

            At that thought, Sue’s stomach twisted. She knew he must be alive, at least, but there were a lot of ways a person could be hurt short of death. An awful lot. What kind of things might have happened to Snape already?

            She hoped he would come by the Headquarters today. Even if he was angry with her, it would be a relief to see him and know that while he was there, at least, he was safe.

            Sue made the bed and then changed into the bunny dress, carefully folding up the borrowed robes and laying them on the bed. She was unbraiding and combing her hair when Kreacher appeared. “When is we going to be destroying Master Regulus’s locket?” he asked without preamble as Sue jumped and nearly dropped her comb.

            “I’m not exactly sure when, Kreacher. Soon,” she promised as his eyes narrowed. “We have to wait for Professor Dumbledore to come with Harry Potter. They have the means of opening the locket and of destroying it.”

            “When is they coming?”

            “As soon as possible. Hopefully today, maybe tomorrow.”

            Before Sue could say anything else, Kreacher disappeared again. She sighed. She had been hoping to sweet-talk him into laundering Snape’s robes, but it was clear that until they had completed his task, he would not warm up to her any further. She would just have to return the robes as-is.

            Downstairs, she found Molly Weasley in the kitchen, directing half a dozen scrub brushes with her wand as they scrubbed every inch of the huge wooden table.

            “Good morning, dear,” she said cheerfully. “Did you sleep well? You look better rested today than you did at dinner last night.”

            “Thank you, Molly, I slept quite well,” Sue replied with a smile. “Can I help you with anything?”

            Molly shook her head as she rinsed and dried the table with a quick charm and sent the scrub brushes floating back to the sink basin. “I was just going to get started on some lunch for everyone. Are you hungry?”

            Sue was, very. Molly summoned sandwich ingredients and set them to assembling themselves and lining up to be cut in half by a knife that worked by itself. Sue helped herself to one while Molly went to the stop of the stairs and called for her children and Sirius. Soon the sound of thundering feet heralded their arrival.

            “Wash your hands before you sit down!” Mrs. Weasley called over the boisterous clamor. Sue knew that there were really only five more people in the room, but it seemed like a lot more. She sat down at the far end of the table with her sandwich, feeling a little overwhelmed. The past three days were catching up to her. It hardly seemed possible that she could really be here, eating lunch with half the Weasley clan and Sirius Black, in the kitchen of his ancestral home. But all of her senses told her, unlikely and insane as that idea was, it was indeed happening.

            “Ta, Molly, I’m famished.” Sirius dropped down next to Sue at the table with a groan. His hair and face were streaked liberally with dust. “Alright, Sue?” he said, nodding at her as he began to cram an entire sandwich into his mouth.

            “Yes. You look like you’ve been working hard. How’s the cleaning going?”

            Sirius grimaced. “If we didn’t need this place as Headquarters, I’d burn it to the ground, I really would. It’ll take all summer just to make sure the worst Dark artifacts have been dealt with, let alone make the place actually fit for habitation.”

            Sue was not sure what to say to that, so she just smiled and sipped the tea that Mrs. Weasley was handing out.

            A sudden quiet fell over the room. Sue looked up to see why and saw Snape, standing in the doorway. Looming in the doorway, more accurately. He did not look angry, exactly, but he didn’t look pleased, either. He ignored everyone else and met Sue’s eye.

            “May I speak with you alone, Miss Smith?” Though the words were polite, the tone he used made it clear that it was not a request. Sirius stiffened, but before he could say anything, Sue touched his arm lightly and shook her head.

            “Of course, Professor,” she said, standing up and brushing crumbs from her hands. Her voice sounded too high even to her own ears. Now everyone was staring at her as she walked over to Snape; she felt her face getting hot and, as soon as her back was to everyone, she scowled at him.

            He gave no sign that he saw this or cared, but simply turned and headed up the stairs. She followed him, muttering a swear under her breath. Even if he had cause to be mad, he was still an ass.

            Snape led her upstairs as far as the first landing, then beckoned her before him into the room opposite. It was quite dim inside; the only light came from the edges of the heavy drapes across all the windows, and the air smelled of mold and thick dust.

            Snape closed the door behind them with a snap and lit his wand. “You seem very friendly with Black,” he sneered. The light from the wand lit up his face unevenly, making the expression on his face seem especially malicious. “And so quickly. I’d watch out if I were you. His friends tend to meet misfortune.”

            Sue frowned at him. “That’s a very cruel thing to say.”

            He smiled coldly. “I’m known for my cruelty, Miss Smith.”

            “I suppose that’s true. Are you proud of that?”

            “We all have our talents. Enough small talk. I want to know what you told Dumbledore.”

            Sue sighed. “And I want to tell you. But it’s not so simple.”

            Snape’s hands clenched into fists. “I beg to differ. I seem to remember you telling me that you trusted _me_ more than Dumbledore, and yet you withhold information from me that you gave him freely.”

            “If I tell you what I told him, it could get you killed,” she said bluntly. His expression didn’t change, but she saw his left arm move, just slightly.

            “Spare me your false concern. You need not fear that the Dark Lord will discover your secrets through me. I have made my mind impenetrable to him.”

            “It’s not false concern.”

            He said nothing, waiting. Sue wavered under the intensity of his stare.

            “Are you sure you can hide your thoughts from him completely? Because if he sees even a hint of this, he’ll kill you on the spot.”

            “I am certain.”

            Sue hesitated. “Okay,” she finally said, taking a deep breath. “Okay.”

            “Vo−the Dark Lord made Horcruxes. That’s how he survived the rebounding of his Killing Curse.”

            “ _Horcruxes?_ ” Snape said, his voice nearly a hiss. “As in, _more than one?_ ”

            “Six of them. Plus one more that he created by mistake.”

            Severus could not believe what he was hearing. He had suspected, of course, that the Dark Lord might have a Horcrux; all of the Death Eaters who knew of Horcruxes had suspected, based on veiled references the Dark Lord had made to his quest for immortality. But Severus had never heard of any wizard performing the ritual multiple times. Even learning how to complete the ritual _once_ was an impressive feat−in his own extensive studies of the Dark Arts, Severus had only ever found vague allusions to their use.

“That is impossible,” he said, but even in his denial he could see that it explained much about the Dark Lord’s transformation, especially the way his essential humanity had seemed to erode like a bad glamour during his first rise to power.

When Severus had first been introduced to him, he still looked like a man, a handsome one at that, and no older than his late thirties, although there were whispers that he had at least twice as many years. By the time he had been defeated by Lily, he had lost his hair and his eyes were as red as blood. When Severus met him for the first time after his second coming, it had taken all his self-possession to even pretend that the thing he bowed to was not a nightmare in the flesh.

The Dark Lord could not have had more than idle theory about what might happen to a wizard who created more than one Horcrux. He must have been mad, to try such a thing all but ignorant of the consequences. If he had not been mad before, he had certainly become so through his appalling efforts. He was truly no longer human.

He almost wished that the girl had not told him.

And then a hand fell on his shoulder, a skeletal white hand with fingers as long as Severus’s hand entire, and a bolt of fear went through him like lightning.

“Oh, Severus. How disappointing.”

            Sue bit back a scream. Her mind went blank with terror as she looked up at the face of Lord Voldemort, who had appeared from nowhere just behind Snape. He was horribly, unnaturally tall and thin, wrapped in a black cloak and robes that hid all but his corpse-pale face and hands, which seemed almost to float independently in the gloom. He had no hair, not even eyebrows, and his eyes were red as coals, but with no warmth, no humanity at all within them.

            She tore her own eyes away to find Snape’s. They were wide with terror. He was frozen like a statue. And then the Dark Lord wrapped his spidery hand around Snape’s neck and started to squeeze.

            Somehow, Sue managed to keep quiet. She backed away, her eyes never leaving the scene before her, and started creeping around them and towards the door, as silently as possible with legs so numb that she could hardly move them. Snape fell to his knees; his face began to turn purple, and yet he did not raise his hands to try to break the Dark Lord’s grip, but let them hang limp as the life was choked out of him.

            She had to get help, before the Dark Lord stopped her−there was no chance that she could protect Snape against that thing, not when it could wave a wand and turn her into a worm to crush beneath its heel, or simply blast the life out of her and return to taking Snape’s. But if she could just get out the door, long enough to scream for help, then maybe−

            Her hip slammed into something hard and flared with pain. Sue dropped to the dusty carpet, clenching her teeth in agony and clutching at her hip but somehow managing not to cry out. Had he seen her after all? But no, she realized as she rolled over and bumped against the legs of some piece of furniture. She looked up, and even in the dim light from Snape’s dropped wand she could see that she had run into the half-open drawer of a desk−

            A desk−!

            “It’s a boggart!” Sue screamed, half in pain, half in a frenzy of relief. “It’s only a boggart, Snape, do you hear me!”

            He was cold as ice, except for his lungs, which burned for air that he couldn’t draw. He stared up at the red and despaired, for he had failed after all, failed her, failed the boy, everyone−

            There was a thud, a body hitting the carpet. The girl, dead−

            But no, she was screaming, although she sounded so far away he could hardly hear−

            And then a small, cold hand was grabbing his, forcing his wand into his dead fingers−

            “A BOGGART!” she screamed in his ear, and the creature choking him flinched−

            A boggart−

            Life surged back into his body; his wand sparked as he raised his hand.

            “ _Ridikulus,”_ he mouthed, no air left to voice the incantation. But it was enough to drive the creature back, enough to make it drop its deathgrip.

            Air had never seemed so sweet. “ _RIDICULUS,”_ he screamed despite the pain in his throat.

            The boggart dissolved into smoke and vanished.

The girl grabbed at his shoulders. “Are you alright?”

Severus managed a nod. The girl let go with a groan and flopped prone on the floor next to him, rubbing at her left hip.

“Ah, fuck. I thought we were dead,” she moaned.

“Me too,” he croaked without thinking, and winced at the soreness this provoked.

“Fucking boggart. Jesus fucking Christ of _Nazareth_.”

Snape snorted. Perhaps it was just the oxygen deprivation, but he felt like he was flying, like he had just jumped from a tall tower and at the last moment halted, drifting lightly as a feather.

“Oh my god. I am gonna have a hell of a bruise. Fuck,” she muttered.

“A boggart,” Snape said, staring at where it had disappeared when he banished it. “A boggart,” he repeated.

“Seriously, Snape, are you alright?” the girl said, sitting up with another groan of pain.

But that wasn’t right, it couldn’t be, he thought. Boggarts couldn’t attack _two_ people with that much focus. They couldn’t split their focus between two people, unless−

Snape swung his wand wildly towards Sue, almost smacking her in the face with the lit end. He needed to see her eyes.

Sue ducked and shielded her eyes with a wince. “What the hell, Snape?”

“What are you afraid of?” he demanded, his voice shaking. Sue blinked at him, trying to see his face around the huge spot floating in her vision.

“Huh?”

And then the light in her face moved, because Snape was putting his arms around her and crushing his mouth against hers. His lips were dry and chapped, and suddenly Sue couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t move, except her arms were around his neck, somehow, and her fingers were in his hair, it was so soft−

“Sue? Everything alright? We heard shouting−“

And then Snape was shoving her away and scrambling to his feet, wand up and eyes wild. Sirius whipped out his own wand and leveled it at Snape in turn, freezing like a setter on point.

“No, Sirius, stop!” Sue cried, struggling to her own feet between them. “For God’s sake, stop, both of you!”

For a heartbeat they all stood frozen, and then Molly Weasley was there in the door behind Sirius, pulling on his arm.

“Sirius, put your wand away! Merlin’s sake! There’s a war on! Aren’t we all on the same side? This is no time for your silly schoolboy grudges!”

And to Sue’s relief, Sirius lowered his wand, and after a moment’s hesitation, so did Snape. Sue met his eye for the briefest glance, but before she could move, he was striding past her, shoving past Sirius. She stood rooted there in his wake, her mind a buzzing blank as she listened to his feet thudding down the stairs.

A door slammed downstairs, and Sue realized he was gone.

Sirius and Molly were staring at her. She felt hot all over and strangely tingly−almost ill, really−heart racing, limbs shaky, stomach queasy, and yet from head to toe incandescent with a giddy feeling of relief and something else−something she wasn’t sure about but it had to do with the feeling of Snape’s hair in her fingers, the warmth of his chest and his lips pressed against hers. She felt so alive, so awake; as though she was soaring, not standing still in a dark dusty room.

And still they were standing there and staring at her, and suddenly Sue couldn’t bear it.

“Excuse me,” she muttered as she squeezed past them and fled upstairs, feeling like she would die if they kept looking at her while she was feeling this way, like a stranger in her own skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
